serinde | Entries tagged with movie

elibalin: Speaking of abysmal movies, we eventually need to grit our teeth and watch "The Spirit."

syringavulgaris: Yes. We do.

syringavulgaris: Alas, The Goddamn Spirit is not on streaming. I can add it to the regular disc queue, though.

syringavulgaris: Though one sees all kinds of random shit when searching for "spirit".

syringavulgaris: Vide:

syringavulgaris: "She was a shy country girl who would become "the People's Princess."" um what

elibalin: What masterpiece be this?

syringavulgaris: "The Spirit of Diana".

elibalin: GAaaaAAaaAaaaAAAAaAAh.

syringavulgaris: There are actually two movies of that name, because we are sinners in the hands of an angry God.

Current Music: Kate Bush, "Cloudbusting"

syringavulgaris: Harrumph. Someone has the band name "stellastarr", I see.

syringavulgaris: Which means that "Stella Starr and the Funboy Two" is off the table.

elibalin: So that makes four people who like "Starcrash."

Step 1: Watch this.
Step 2: Follow along the below conversation, kind of like a sing-along with the ball bouncing along the words on the TV screen.
Step 3: Wait patiently, the orderlies will be here with a syringe very soon.
( Play along at home! )

(Yes, I only just got to see it. I've been busy.)

elibalin,

nedlnthred, and I went last night. We had the perfect mix: Beth had never read the comic, I had but not recently, and Eli had fairly recently. We all give it the Thumbs-Up of Approval. No, of course it's not as nuanced, how could it be? but I think it transmitted the central theme well. The casting choices ranged from "does the job" to "fucking brilliant": that Rorschach was picture-perfect, let me tell you. I was also getting a large amount of nerdgirl happy over ~~Blue Beetle~~ Night Owl. Yes, yes, yes.

I saw a DVD of "Tales of the Black Freighter" in my FNCS; I wonder if that means they'll cut it together with the film for ultimate release?

Also, let me take a moment to indulge in the happy of being home in half an hour after leaving the theater.

It's a Sherlock Holmes film...

...directed by Guy Ritchie...

...starring Robert Downey Jr as Holmes, and Jude Law as Watson...

...currently filming in Williamsburg...

...with the antagonist being a Satanist peer.

what.

syringavulgaris: My spies have told me the SHOCKING TWIST!!~ of the new M. Night Shamalamadingdong. Would you care to partake?

elibalin: OWLBEARS!

syringavulgaris: Close:
( O NOES TEH SPOILERZ )

So, there is this movie Doomsday coming out, well, today actually. And the trailer makes it look like nothing more than a tarted-up British version of Escape From New York with a hot chick instead of Kurt Russell (not, to my mind, an improvement) and Bob Hoskins instead of Lee Van Cleef (that could be okay), where they have not even bothered to file off the serial numbers. So I would ordinarily give it a big honkin' miss.

Except! It's by Neil Marshall, who brought us Dog Soldiers and The Descent, both of which were astonishingly good, and if you haven't seen them get off your tuchus & do so at once. I don't know which way to jump on this one, I really don't.

Or, "all our couch potato time during long weekend". (

jdev has already commented some on these matters; q.v.)

Plan 9 From Outer Space, also the sound of my Ed Wood cherry being popped. They did not lie. It is bad. But screamingly funny in its badness.

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. I'd never seen it, since I was a little too young (and uninterested in horror or boobies) during Elvira's heyday of popularity, but what a gloriously fun romp of campiness!

Vampyros Lesbos: Jesus Christ, was this ever bad. Not even bad in a good way. Not even good in a lesbian vampire way. There were points of hilarity, such as the random, inexplicable cuts to small insects doing their own things (our best guess for the scorpion is that its tail represents the erection of the hopeful male viewers desperately waiting for Hot Vampire Chick On Vampire Chick Action; we have no idea about the moth. Or the psionic kite), but mostly just utterly tedious. Begs for MST3K to compress it to maybe an hour.

Tango and Cash. The only thing that saves this movie from being a lower-middle-to-crappy generic 80s action buddy film that would never darken my TV's doorstep is the fact that Stallone and Russell are absolute gold together. Every moment of interaction between them is worth it. I am not just saying this because I <3 The Kurt, either.

Boondock Saints, rented on

dariodevil's persuasion. Holy wow, was it ever good. (Steve and Dario are still downstairs raving about the direction and cinematography, twenty+ minutes after we finished it.)

We shut off both Transylvania 6-5000 and Anchorman partway in, due to boredom. Pity, on the former. We had hopes of Adorable Young Jeff Goldblum, but he could not save it from its direness. (I already knew I didn't have any use for the latter.)

Bonus Crap TV:
* I'm very disappointed in the Beeb. Their "Robin Hood" series stinks in every possible respect. Swear to God, Maid Marian is wearing a sweater set at one point. ...I will probably have to go back and re-watch ITV's "Robin of Sherwood" to see if my older, wiser, more jaded self will love it as much as my barely-pubescent, first-stirrings-of-womanhood self did, or whether it was no better than this tripe. --Can't be this bad. No. No way could it be.

* Robot Chicken is, as always, awesome.

* I really wish Scrubs hadn't gone all sitcom in later seasons. It's still enjoyable, but not The Best Damn Thing On TV as it was the first couple.

* Love Batman:TAS as I did when I occasionally caught it when first broadcast. Hate hate HATE intrusive interstitial advertising. Die in a fire, Disney Channel, though G4 can go first.

My potato bread does, in fact, kick impressive amounts of ass. (I may make it again tomorrow.) The soda bread is a bit ehh and dry, but I was kind of expecting that. Gangs of New York is still a pretty excellent movie that is woefully encumbered by a pointless, gratuitous, generic romantic subplot pastede on yay (and the last ~half hour should be its own extended music video or something).

( SPOILERS for first page of V for Vendetta, though not much of 'em )

Current Music: Fleetwood Mac, "Tusk"

And now they're watching Constantine, the good God only knows why. There is not enough tequila in the world, and even if there was, none of it's in me. With no sweet cushion of alcoholic haze, I stayed to the spot where we have a slow-motion worm's-eye-shot of the cigarette falling out of The Keanu's hand as he is about to exit a cab. Aaaaaand...we're done.

In the course of the move, I found Mom's fondue pot and all the bits for it, so we had A Very 70s New Year. I used the Joy of Cooking cheese fondue recipe, and it tasted fine, but the cheese never fully integrated with the liquids, so what you had was a thinner somewhat-cheesy-flavored wine top section and a cheese sludge below. What's up with that? Longer cooking needed? I was using half Emmenthal and half Gruyere, which is AIUI canonical, so I don't think it's a type-of-cheese problem.

Started the evening with Denis Leary's Merry Fucking Xmas, which I only caught part of due to nursing fondue along, but what I did catch was awesome; I would so bear his children. (Engage rant about Beth having an elevator ride with him WHEN I WASN'T THERE hmph.) We then proceeded to Fantastic Four. It was surprisingly entertaining, actually. I expected to be far more annoyed by it, particularly since

dariodevil had just lent me Waid's most excellent run on the comic, but it was in good fun and most of the differences were not wholly egregious. The weakest part was unquestionably Doom (not the actor's fault--he seemed to be doing exactly what the script & director demanded), and the strongest part Ben and Johnny, both individually and together. Ioan Gruffudd did a better job as Reed than I ever expected; not because I don't love him, I certainly do, but it seemed a woeful miscasting. The performance lacked Reed's self-assurance, but again, that's what the moviemakers seemed to want, as his Character Arc[tm] was all about becoming confident and Winning The Chick and all that shite, so whatever. Jessica Alba was...kind of a cipher. While it's true that a big part of Sue's role in the family dynamic of the FF is to play mama to and mediator between the nerd, the tough guy, and the young punk, and this is something which borders on the stereotypical, she came off in this as Insert Stereotypical Female Bombshell Here, Oh And We'll Say She's A Scientist So We Don't Look Like Chauvinist Pigs, Even Though She Wears Everything Zipped To Her Solar Plexus To Show Off Her BQQBIES. Meh. Bleh. I think a better actress could have brought more chops to the part, though it would've been an uphill battle. Rambling aside, it was a fun beer & pretzels movie.
Eli's review: "Doom is not referring to himself in the third person nearly enough."

And then, into the abyss that is Van Helsing.

I knew it was bad. Everyone said it was bad. I just had no notion exactly how bad it could be with a budget like that. And Hugh Jackman. HUGH fucking JACKMAN. They put him in a movie and made him utterly unattractive to me. That's a whole dimension of suck which is not detectable by our primitive science. And when I say it is jaw-droppingly terrible, I mean that literally; my mouth was hanging open at parts. What a complete train wreck. And poor David Wenham went from Faramir to this shitburger? Honey, what kind of blackmail material could they possibly have had over you? No hooker photos could be worth this. Really.
Eli's review: "The Vatican wanted to kill off Dracula because he'd stolen all the gay in Europe."

Led a minor horde to see King Kong last night. I'm not sure why, exactly, I was so very eager--I've never seen any of the earlier versions, and what I did know (to wit, giant ape + screaming blonde + Empire State Building + biplanes) might incline me to a matinee but not Opening Night Mania. But, there it was, and in the event it proved a deserving vessel for the excitement.

Must check out more Adrien Brody. 150% Swoon-Worthy Or Your Money Back. Not classically handsome (not with that beak on him!) but somehow...oh yes, I'll take three. It helped, I'm sure, that the character he was playing was very close to that mythical perfect man: sensitive, intelligent, witty, and yet capable of being Dashingly Heroic in the clinch--but just enough nerd quotient that he doesn't seem like a plastic icon. Anyways, steamy-hot from all directions.

Naomi Watts: the word that kept coming to mind was "luminous". She's come a long way since Jet Girl, baby. (Not that I didn't love her as Jet, but it's not exactly what you call a career-building role.) Nice attention to detail: note that her hair has started to grow out on the trip from NYC to Kong's island, and then when they're back in the States it's short again, per the fashion.

And, that really was the role Jack Black was born to play. He plays up the selfish sleaziness to the point where you're ready to root for him to get eaten by a passing monster, and then he'll turn around and be human at you. And then switch back before you get all sentimental. Perfect.

It's amazing how far Peter Jackson has pushed the special-effects envelope. You would swear on a stack of Bibles there was an actual giant fucking ape hopping around in front of the camera, and there's none of that fake-feeling you usually get from CGI. Warning: he just can't bloody well let go of the creepy-crawlies, so people who share my issues should look away when Our Heroes wake up in the deep dark chasm. He apparently had a checklist of all the critters that I can't cope with and was determined to hit them all, as the only one he missed was octopuses.

I could have wished for fewer Huns and Neanderthals in the audience. It wasn't too bad, not like some I've seen, but we had a dweeb pack immediately to the left who failed to Get It and kept snorking at inappropriate moments, and a few more like them scattered throughout. Feh.

Anyways, go see it. On the big screen, duh.

ObMusic: the creation of this post occasioned a roundtable discussion about the proper plural of "octopus". And then that song got stuck in my head. Hmph.

Current Music: The Beatles, "Octopus' Garden"

audiovile and I went to see this last night. You can definitely see the shit-covered footprints of studio demands all over it, like the track of a kitty who has been having disappointing bowel movements, but there was still enough glorious Gilliam fantasy to make it eminently worthwhile. Even at the NYC pound-of-flesh rates.

Creepy as hell, too. There are points where I had to avert my eyes just from the sheer OMG of it. I don't mean gory, either, I mean creepy.

How many movies can YOU think of whose little "place and time" caption says "French-Occupied Germany" ? w00t!

Heath Ledger bulked up for this--not muscular, but a bit towards comfortably plump; I didn't even recognize him. That's a pretty ballsy move for an actor in this obsessive day & age, and I honor him for it. Steve is exceedingly smug about having spotted out the comic-opera-Italian operative of the French government as being the "This is how we do things on RUSSIAN space station!!" guy from Armageddon. I am exceedingly smug at recognizing Sam from Brazil as the French general. Matt Damon is TEH HOTT with hair of this particular length and he should do it more often.

Be advised: there are scenes where you have the very strong feeling that Gilliam set down the camera to go get a cup of coffee, and some dweeb who wants to grow up to be Chris Columbus picked it up and shot a sequence, then ran away before Gilliam came back.

8782 tells me that Gilliam did in fact walk off the set at a few points during filming, so there ya go. The ending definitely has that Blade Runner Theatrical Release vibe, and therefore I look forward to seeing the director's cut someday.