We took advantage of a few of M's over 100 free rentals at Scarecrow, and picked up several movies to watch. I'd had a yen (no pun intended) to see Sukiyaki Western Django. So we started with that.  If ultra violence makes you queasy, give it a pass. It had some lovely bits interspersed with a lot of dullness. The conceit of Japanese actors in a western setting only carries you so far. Sort of like doing Shakespeare in the 1920's, you better have more than just that to make it work, and Takashi Mike just doesn't. Also, it immediately struck me that we were watching a version of Pale Rider, which was a version of High Plains Drifter. Does no one watch Clint Eastwood movies anymore? All the reviews I've read after the fact reference the spaghetti western influence but not that specific movie, but seriously, it just smacked the plot down. it also had strong echos of Kill Bill as well. Some interesting parts, but the whole was weak.

Then we watched Hamlet 2, which was an enjoyable romp.  I enjoyed the tale of the mishaps of a really dreadful HS drama teacher who writes, produces, and stages (against the schools best efforts) his own production of Hamlet 2, because after all, Hamlet is just such a downer.  It's a piece of marshmallow, but an ok enough one. I suspect I liked it better than M, but my tolerance levels are broader. It's a spoof, and a rather self-centered spoof at that, but I don't think it had a bad-intentioned bone in its vacant body.  I give props to Elizabeth Shue's good nature for being in it at a nurse and playing herself.

There are a few missteps here and there, but they are minor. It feels like it wanted to be a longer movie. We know nothing about the students who are in it, and it seems like we should for some of the later scenes to make sense. In the long run, we dont care. A longer Hamlet 2 would have been bad. None of it matters. It's a comedy that you forget 10 minutes after you've seen it.

I didn't want to watch anything serious today, so we passed on a number of better movies. And we have Red Dwarf waiting in the wings.

An Indian Dickensian tale as predictable as a heartbeat and sweet as candy.  It's enjoyable and charming and doesn't have an ounce of surprise in it's good-natured bones.

Put together by Danny Boyle so, all in all, I'm not entirely sure how Indian it is, but apparently not enough to keep it from qualifying for Best Picture. For which I have to say, Seriously? That's like saying marshmallow should be it's own food group, up there with vegetables and meat. I mean, it's enjoyable, but you don't want to have too much of it.

it has some rough moments, It starts with waterboarding and electrical torture, and includes children being blinded and various other scenes of how beastly life is for the truly dirt fucking poor.  But redemptive, redemptive.

I thought M was going to choke coming out. A tad sweet for his palette, but I was happy enough with it.

Previews for Watchmen (big screen), Wolverine Origins (seriously, I don't care if it sucks, I'd be happy seeing Babylon AD, so you know how low my standards can go), Angels and Demons (which looks really awful, OK, that's if you're me and didn't actually like the DaVinci Code all that much Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus and they had a baby that is so old blah blah blah I read too much ).

When I was a girl, I fell into Doyle's stories like modern girls fall into Twilight. I had -such- a crush on Sherlock. He was strong, smart, and had mad skills. (Sure, they were boy's adventures, but you should have seen my collection of Doc Savage. I love that stuff!)

Finally, someone has made a Holmes that is more in line with my heated pre-adolescent mind. Thank you, Mr. Ritchie. It is the stuff that dreams are made on.

For me anyway. And no, I don't give a damn if it's good or not.

ZULU!!!

And you can't get it here. :-(

But through the wonderful magic of the Internet, you can buy it from Amazon UK. :-)

Many reviews say this is a fantastic transfer, and then they go all technobabbly. Whatever!

I love this movie so much, I have the soundtrack on my poddie.  The codec is supposed to be all regions, so yay!

I think we have it on order so I'll stop burbling now.

SQUEEEE!!!

After a pretty hateful day at work (Oh look, you have no children, you take care of everything because you have no life that matters to anyone, no one cares if you're home late since you don't need to do anything at home for CHILDREN). Don't get me wrong, I like kids. The tyranny of being the person sans kids around the holidays gets tiresome.

Anyway. That's all the whining I'm going to do.

We watched ChungKing Express, which was delightful albeit a little confusing. It seemed like director Wong kar-Wai loved his first noir story, then got bored, and decided to do something else.  I found the hinge point between the two stories to be pretty creaky, but the acting was so superb and I loved the characters  in both stories so much, I forgave him. We found that we literally couldn't take our eyes off the movie, having to pause for mad dashes for hot chocolate so we didn't lose a second.

Tony Leung! He was winsome as silent cop (#663) who loses his girlfriend and talks to inanimate objects. I love him! Almost as much Mathieu (doesn't return my calls) Amalric. I forgot Leung was in in Hero, which was a beautiful film. What a great actor! The first lonesome male protagonist, officer 223, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro was also extreme sweet and a fine actor. I felt he did so much to add charm to a lonely guy who did nothing but eat and whine.  I haven't seen House of Flying Daggers, but I'm feeling kind of inspired to see him in it.  And Faye Wong! For a first time actress, she was enchanting. She made me laugh. We enjoyed it in spite of the middle story confusion. By the end, it didn't matter any more, we were just delighted.

I thought that 1) the marketing department should be hung by their keyboards for mispromoting this film.. Wow, the advertising really had nothing to do with what it was; and 2) that it was a really interesting failure.

It didn't quite succeed in winning my heart, as many other interesting failures have done (Mystery Men and Six String Samurai among them), but I didn't dislike it. The cast was over all good and tried hard to make do as much as they could with a script that needed some serious work. I liked the initial concept of what it would be like to really be a superhero, and a disaffected one at that. Not so great, in fact. That had its rough and dark charms. I found the bolting on of the second half, which explains where Hancock comes from, to be pretty awkward. The story itself grew on me, with its graphic novel logic and mythology.  It just felt like the movie was split in two, and pretty inelegantly. There were also some, to my mind, pretty jarring missteps in choices they made that I thought were seriously unfortunate. The music in the nasty prison scene. The whole thing with the excessively blonde German kid. They didn't work for me in a big way but perhaps I'm just too sensitive.  My feeling is, if you're going to be brutal, be brutal, but don't then try to make a joke out of it. I'm unwilling to find it funny.

I was glad they let the ordinary dad be a hero at the end. That pleased me. 

There was a whole lot about the film that really needed explaining. What was it with the drawings in Hancock did?  They looked interesting and like they meant something, but were never explained, I would have like to know more about the mythology and what happens next. There was a lot of garbled stuff that left me scratching my head. I'm going with sloppy script writing. It would be nice to have had at least a little cleared up with deleted scenes or something.  Oh well.

It wasn't bad, but I'm glad I didn't see it in the theater.

I was keen on seeing this, and not disappointed. I like Daniel Craig as the new Bond very much. I'm quite pleased with his no-nonsense, slightly vicious take on the character. He looks good in and outside a suit, and betrays a disarming vulnerability when it comes to the female sex which I have to find endearing. He is a slightly battered knight errant, which is why he and M are such a good match.

Really, she is his Lady, and he is her Knight. He will go on any quest to win her favor, which is impossible to gain in life. It is the true chivalric ideal, which was not about romance but religion (or in this instance, country).


SPOILERS BELOW: I have yet to get the darn cut command to work for me. Forgive, please.

I found some of the fight scenes a little too fast for me to follow. Especially the one with Mitchell, where both men were in similar color suits and jumping around and swinging from things. Very exciting but damned if I could tell who was hitting who sometimes.

It was a problem for me believing they all flew into La Paz, and then just ran around normally. Sorry! I have relatives who fly to La Paz routinely to visit their family. It takes 3 days to a week for a low lander to acclimate to the highest city in the world (never, if you're sensitive like my brother who always ended up in the hospital). My niece and nephew, both half Bolivian, and their mother, who grew up in La Paz, take several days before they can manage walk for long. It's very high. When they go to the family's ranch in the mountains, it takes another day. I've never visited because it sounded so miserable. So I found that amusing, but that's just me.

The computer system at MI-6 was fab. I loved that, and loved all the other techno gadgetry. I thought Mathieu Amalric (Why don't you return my calls?) made a great villain. Soooo swoony. Sorry they killed him off, but wait, we didn't actually see a body. . .

I liked the tribute to Goldfinger.

I look forward to seeing what they do next. I was happy with this one. Perhaps it wasn't as well rounded as Casino Royale, but it worked well for me and I felt consolidated Bond, M and Felix together.

Oh, and I liked the Watchman preview.

I spent the day in our Portland office, and at our Potluck lunch, seasonal conversation turned to what were the movies that scared you, still scared you. Scary movies. Everyone has them. Some of them may not seem so scary to others. I'm not even talking about good movies here, but the ones that, to you, were scary. When I was a kid, The Blob scared the bejeezus out of me. I haven't seen it since I was, maybe 8. It was a behind-the-couch movie for sure! Equinox. I saw that in the movie theaters when I was a kid. Terrified me! Oh if only my mom had let me go to the Hammer movies that showed up at our local movie house(s) (The Park and The Strand, long gone now). But the posters were way too lurid for her to let a tender little girl go on a Saturday afternoon.

Here's my list of movies that totally give me the creeps. I'm not saying they're good. They just hit my scary bone.

1. The Haunting, the original 1963 version based on Shirley Jackson's book. Still scares me to death!

2. The Ring, I haven't seen the Japanese version, the American version is plenty scary for me.

3. Poltergeist, That tree just terrifies me. Gives me the screamy heebie jeebies.

4. Aliens, Scared me to death, I still jump a mile.

5. Night of the Living Dead. I nearly killed myself running into traffic when my boyfriend pretended to be a zombie. it still completely creeps me out.

What are your fearsome five?

We were impressed by how well attended Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein were last night at SIFF. Pretty full house for both.

Bride is the better of the two, although I'd forgotten the pathos of Frankenstein. The monster  (who appears an ugly but essentially clueless creature) is created a second time by the brute inhumanity of Fritzy (who's more of a monster than the monster) and the callous indifference of its creator. Which is the brilliance of the film.

By the time Bride was made four years later, Karloff was eating well, and the monster, in a side-by-side comparison as we got last night, was clearly a better fed creature. The gaunt, starved face was gone, and he was definitely a tad on the paunchy side by comparison. It was also interesting to see that, whereas in Frankenstein, the monster was dead but human, in Bride he'd become some altogether different. A true monster with superhuman strength which was lacking in the first movie.

Most of what we remember, we remember from Bride. The wonderful Dr. Praetorius, Minnie, played with panache by Una O'Conner, it's a better movie, but I though lacked the pathos of the first.

Beforehand, we ate at Bamboo Garden, all vegetarian all the time. I love their chicken ball, which have nothing to do with either item but are some kind of fried fungus. So good!  Mark had the Mongolian Beef, again, some sort of tofu/fungus combination. Really spicy.

Then we wandered through City Center for awhile. We watched some teenagers play with the fountain. That was fun. The fountain liked it too. They eventually got loud (and wet) enough that it was fully "fountainy" and erupting in all its watery glory, whereas when they arrived and began running up to touch it, only a few dabs of water were trickling out. Amazing what a small group of shrieking teenagers can do. We were amused. They were happy. The fountain liked the attention.

It was a pleasant evening.

Seriously, this is total squeeage for me.

Guy Ritchie's new Sherlock Holmes movie has Robert Downey Jr. playing Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law as Watson.

Actually, don't care about Jude Law, but squee on the RD Jr. as Sherlock Holmes.

Watched the Iron Man DVD. So very, very good. I really do think RD Jr. can be good at anything. Not Dark Knight good, but fun, and did I mention RD Jr.?

Blu Ray isn't yet doing that much for me, except with old movies, which it spiffs up extremely nicely. Mark says this is because we don't have as good a screen as we should. I will say, CGI, you can really tell. That's where it shines even with our current screen. 

A better description of Johnny Depp couldn't be written.

I had great reservations about "Sweeney Todd." I first saw it in Toronto with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou. It blew me away. I've gone out of my way to see and hear every production since then, and I'm a huge Sondheim fan. I maintained doubts about the casting.

However, a third of the way into the movie, I leaned over to Mark and whispered, "Johnny Depp really can do anything, can't he?"
At which my spouse sagely nodded.

Depp is ferocious. Intimidating, and the first Sweeney I've seen who is really scary. I truly believed this man was capable of terrible things, and his screen presence more than makes up for the lack in voice that others, such as ironymaiden have commented on from listening to the soundtrack.

He's a genuinely frightening Sweeney, which none of the great baritones were.

A few days before going we watched the George Heard/Patti LuPone version, which we have on DVD and I have to say Helena Bonham Carter's Mrs. Lovett is a direct descendant of Patti LuPone's. She's got nothing to be embarrassed about. She did a fine job with the role.

I loved the young Toby.  Johanna was fine in her brief appearances, as was the beggar woman. Anthony was a bit problematic, but the love story is so secondary in this Sweeney I didn't much care.  I never really have cared about Anthony.

Nothing felt missing. Some of the songs were curtailed, but it worked in the context of the movie. Judge Turpin's flagellation song was cut, but then it often is, and it was replaced with some other devices that made up for it and were equally creepy. The Beadle was dreadful and nasty. There was a real Victorian flair to several moments in the movie that I won't give away because they delighted me with their Dickensian awfulness, and I want you, gentle reader, to be egually delighted and appalled.

There were only two scenes that were a tad disappointing: the beginning of "By the Sea" bewildered me, but my kvetching is minor. And I see no reason why they couldn't have stuck the ballad in at the end, during the credits. It makes perfect sense, in context, why they couldn't in the beginning of the movie, but please, they used it thematically throughout the film, give it to us at least during the credits. I was sad about that.

I thought it was fabulous. I truly did. I'll buy the DVD for sure. London looked as awful and stagy as it ought to, IMO, the pie shop looked like no place a decent person ought ever, anytime, to eat in. It was grand. I loved it, and I wasn't sure I would, so it was a good surprise.