Stub Hubby

136: Dove Tail

2012-01-23T11:16:00.001-05:00

Sometimes two songs fit together perfectly. Sometimes this is pure chance, sometimes I place songs in a certain order for conscious reasons, sometimes for reasons I can't explain. Somehow, when I chose to place "Chicago" by Sufjan Stevens right after "Glory" by Liz Phair, I made a perfect dovetail fit. The end of one and the beginning of another complement each other so well. What an exciting way to start this mix.

"Glory" Liz Phair
"Chicago" Sufjan Stevens
"Break Me" This Lemonheads song is from Evan Dando's scattershot final album before bottoming out on drugs, Car Button Cloth. The song is underwritten but has its moments.
"Rearviewmirror" [live] I was at this epic Pearl Jam show, at the Orpheum Theater April 12, 1994.
"Live With Me" [live] The Rolling Stones, from Get Yer Ya Ya's Out!
"Evangeline" Just when it seems I've put every song from Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend on a mix already, I find this one.
"The Ballad of El Goodo" I only began listening to Big Star about a decade ago, and I've come to appreciate them, if not love them.
"Chains of Love" A nice little Ryan Adams song, from his mellow new album Ashes & Fire.
"Chasing Pavements" My sister-in-law Sara was my Secret Santa this year. She got me both of Adele's CDs, plus her live DVD!
"Philosophy" Ben Folds Five I just heard Ben Folds perform this song on The Nerdist podcast this week.
"Valerie Plame" I fell in love with The Decemberists The King Is Dead last year, now I'm discovering some of their previous music.
"How'd You Like That" The Kooks are perfecting some mid-80s Britpop...
...which reminds me of "Perfect Way" by Scritti Politti.
"Everybody Wants To Rule The World" Tears For Fears, live at Knebworth June 30, 1990.
"Get Rhythm" I just watched Walk The Line on FX last month. I don't know if I can fit this Johnny Cash song onto this mix?

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

2012-01-15T15:49:00.000-05:00

I am very fond of spy thrillers. They come in all shapes and sizes, and based on the trailers, I guessed that this one would be impenetrably complicated and jam-packed with the best English character actors. As long as you don't expect the crack open the puzzle box, I can recommend the movie. I also recommend the big screen. It's too quiet and dark to enjoy on TV at home, unless you watch it late at night with all the lights out.

There's lots of old-school trenchcoating in this movie.

Gary Oldman is retired espionage veteran George Smiley, called back to the MI6 to root out the Soviet mole amongst the agents who control British spies behind the Iron Curtain. The suspects:

David Dencik (both Dragon Tattoo movies),
Ciarán Hinds (Munich, Road to Perdition, There Will be Blood),
Toby Jones (Captain America, The Mist, Hunger Games),
and Colin Firth!

(L-R): Dencik, Firth, Jones, Hurt, Oldman, and Hinds.

Gary Oldman is terrific as a spy winding down his middle age, creaking into retirement. It feels like he hardly talks at all in the movie. How do you write a part like this on paper? People reveal themselves to him and he observes, nods, grimaces, and gives orders. Only in the dénouement does he reveal what he's thinking, and he only raises his voice one time. Oldman's finally been nominated for the Sean Connery "De Facto Lifetime Achievement" Oscar for this part. Of course it's not his career best performance. I would be hard-pressed to choose between Sid Vicious, Dracula, and Stansfield the crooked narcotics detective in LEON.

The movie is full of tension, suspense, drama, but almost no action. Except for three people getting shot,-- two very matter-of-fact, and one extremely graphically-- the spying consists of listening, watching, and reading typed reports.

Cheers to the art direction for the dour 1970s color pallette. I think the sun came out for one scene, the remainder is gloomy wet Englishness.

The stellar cast also includes Mark Strong, who dies in the first 5 minutes (no surprise there), John Hurt, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Next Big Thing Tom Hardy: After grabbing everyone's attention in Inception, he's wearing a bad wig in TTSS, and all over your TV this week in commercials for THIS MEANS WAR.
He'll be Batman's nemesis Bane in the new Dark Knight movie later in 2012.

I was also pleased to discover there were three speaking parts for women! One analyst, one secretary (Lady Edith from Downton Abbey), and one wife.

ALSO by Gary Oldman on STUB HUBBY:

Another Rant About West Newton Cinema: It's always a gamble seeing a movie in West Newton. The clientele are the worst variety of upper-class entitled seniors, talking to each other like we're in their living room. This type of moviegoer NEVER understands the plot of the movie, and TTSS was sure to be complex. The good news this time, there were only maybe two dozen people in Cinema 1, and the baby boomers near me were quiet. I could hear murmuring in the distance between EVERY dialog scene, but I could live with it.

Guys Movie Night: 48 HRS and COMMANDO

2012-01-14T11:09:00.000-05:00

My Birthday at the Movies
The David Patrick Kelly/James Horner Double Feature

What a great time! The Somerville Theater has a "microcinema" in their basement. It looks like a regular theater, but teeny: 35 seats, with a decent sized screen, Blu-Ray player, surround sound, and digital projector. For $200 it's yours all day. We had a great time eating pizza, drinking beer, and enjoying two manly movies for guys. What a treat it was to watch two movies I'd never seen on the big screen, and certainly never with the sound turned way up! Just the Paramount logo and the opening notes of James Horner's 48 HRS score gave me chills.

48 HRS is still terrific thirty years later. The action scenes as crackling good, Nolte is perfect as the tough detective out to revenge the cop killed with his gun, and Eddie Murphy blows up the screen in his debut, with a performance we'd all take for granted by the end of the decade. James Remar is riveting as the vicious cop killer Albert Ganz.

NOTE: grey sweater vest

It's a gritty detective movie with a funny side to it, but the humor is filtered through a grim layer of racism, sexism, and general meanness. The blend is remarkable. It's kind of amazing that it works. The humor is not fun, if that makes any sense. It's also kind of amazing that it was a commercial success, considering I can't recommend a guy take his girlfriend to see it.

Landlines & Payphones: Obviously no one has a mobile phone in this movie. It seems every 5 minutes someone is placing a call on a landline. It's hilarious. I can only imagine what my son's generation will think.

Don't stare at the lump on my forehead!

There's one scene where Nick Nolte's lieutenant chews him out "everybody's watching on this one", "your ass is on the line", etc, etc, which is such a cliche now that the same actor (Frank McRae) spoofed that speech in National Lampoon's Lethal Weapon 1 and The Last Action Hero (both 1993).

It's also hard to watch Nolte driving a sky blue 1960 Cadillac convertible with a straight face. It's such a cliche, and maybe the worst possible car to drive in hilly San Francisco. Speaking of San Francisco, you may notice the lack of romantic "postcard" views of the city- I appreciated that. Also, I think the city's historic cable car system was being rebuilt during the time of filming, which would explain why we don't see any cable cars.

The score: I really like James Horner's non-traditional score, full of steel drums. That same year he scored Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but perhaps he's best known for the score to Titanic. Other memorable films include: Avatar, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, Braveheart, The Pelican Brief, Glory, Field of Dreams, Aliens, and the second movie in our double feature, COMMANDO.

Try not to stare at the vein bulging in his biceps.

I watched COMMANDO many times as a teenager. Arnold Schwarzenegger is John Matrix, a retired elite Black Ops Commando, although you wouldn't know he's retired from the size of his muscles.

Saturday is tree-carrying day.

Matrix launches a one-man war against a group of South American criminals who have kidnapped his daughter.This one-man war consists of hand-to-hand combat (sometimes versus a dozen mall cops), brute force, explosions, automatic gunfire, scalping with a circular sawblade, dismemberment with a circular sawblade, impalement with pitchfork, and finally, barely disguised homoerotic knifefighting against a portly Australian in a mesh sweatervest.

Another grey knit sweater vest, and yes, it makes you look fat.

Brooklyn native (and Tufts University graduate) Dan Hedaya plays the villain, a deposed dictator from "South America". The 1980s were a golden age of movies with made-up Latin American banana republics!
Besides all the unintentional comedy in the action scenes, the movie hardly makes any sense. Unlike 48 HRS, which was too awesome to riff on, COMMANDO was a hot mess. We had a blast picking it apart.

Our double feature had two major players in common: James Horner is back with another steel drum-filled score, but not as effective this time around. And David Patrick Kelly is back, playing another douchebag, this time with more spine. He dies in both movies.

I made all my friends pledge to host movie parties for each of their birthdays this year. If booked for a weeknight, it's only $100, or $10 each if nine friends attend. THINK ABOUT IT Adam, Angus, Brian, Brian, Geoff, George, Ilan, Jeff, Jose, Kevin, Scott, Tom, and Vinnie.

135 Calamity Music

2012-01-12T13:47:00.000-05:00

"We Belong" Big Daddy's Pizza in Brighton has good pizza, excellent hot sandwiches, tasty fried dough bites, the best crab rangoons, and a dance remix of this Pat Benatar on their "hold" music.
"Every Little Kiss" I have wanted this Bruce Hornsby & The Range CD for twenty-five years. The drums and synths sound super-dated, but I don't even care anymore.
"Crash And Burn" The synths on this 'til tuesday song also sound dated, but Aimee Mann is so terrific, I have been trying to squeeze this song onto a mix for 10 years.
"Dawned On Me" My favorite song from Wilco's new album The Whole Love.
"Secret Smile" I have been a fan of Semisonic even since I read the drummer's memoir of their one-hit wonder moment in the spotlight: So You Want to Be a Rock & Roll Star. This ballad has that post-Achtung Baby "One" production sound.
"She's The One" When I heard this World Party song on the radio, I was immediately reminded of...
"Still Fighting It" Ben Folds
"Kiss From A Rose" When I was a radio DJ in 1994, I played this Seal song on the radio at least 6 times a week for six months, so naturally, I spent most of the last 17 years avoiding it. However, the karaoke version on Community cracks me up and has resurrected the song for me.
"Crazy On You" Heart: The classical guitar intro fits nicely with the baroque feel of the Seal song.
"Calamity Song" I love every song on The Decemberists new album The King Is Dead. This is the latest favorite. Andalusian tribes, indeed! Fits nicely with the "end of the world" 2012 Mayan baloney going around these days.
"Romance" I used to play this R.E.M. song on the radio when I was in high school. It's from their "best of" album Eponymous, released at the end of their contract with IRS records. According to the sleeve notes, the song "used a microsecond in the still despairing Alan Rudolph's 1987 film "Made In Heaven".
"Never There" CAKE
"Crazy Love, Vol. II" Paul Simon
"Long, Long, Long" The Beatles
"I'll Be Back" I forget where I heard that Shawn Colvin covered this obscure Beatles track. She only released it on her Best Of collection, but, in the era of iTunes, you don't have to buy a Best Of collection to get the one new song anymore!

MELLOW GOLD Collection

2012-01-04T22:39:00.000-05:00

The track listing of the three-LP collection MELLOW GOLD. The magic of the Internet: for only $33 (minus whatever songs you already own) you can recreate this collection with mildewy sleeve and no changing the platter five times! I think I have 14 of these songs already, so, assuming nothing's out of print, I am $19 away from bringing this collection BACK TO LIFE!

Side 1

"Sundown" Gordon Lightfoot
"Midnight at the Oasis" Maria Muldaur
"I Say a Little Prayer for You" Aretha Franklin
"Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye" The Casinos
"Long Train Running" The Doobie Brothers

Side 2
"You Were on My Mind" We Five
"Sunshine" Jonathan Edwards
"Cherish" The Association
"Hey Jude" Wilson Pickett
"Ma Belle Amie" The Tee Set
"That’s the Way I Always Heard it Should Be" Carly Simon

Side 3
"S.O.S." ABBA
"How Can I Be Sure?" The Rascals
"I’d Like to Get to Know You" Spanky and Our Gang
"Everybody’s Talkin’" Nilsson
"My Special Angel" the Vogues
"Love the One You’re With" Stephen Stills

Side 4
"Anticipation" Carly Simon
"Dock of the Bay" Otis Redding
"Doctor My Eyes" Jackson Browne
"Feel Like Makin’ Love" Roberta Flack
"One of a Kind (Love Affair)" The Spinners

Side 5
"Summer Breeze" Seals & Crofts
"Baby, I’m Yours" Barbara Lewis
"Hello, It’s Me" Todd Rundgren
"Send in the Clowns" Judy Collins
"She’s Gone" Daryl Hall and John Oates
"(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" Aretha Franklin

Side 6
"Fallin’ in Love" The Souther, Hillman, Furay Band
"Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues" Danny O’Keefe
"Baby Don’t Go" Sonny and Cher
"Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town" Kenny Rogers & The First Edition
"Everything That Touches You" The Association

When I Was Eleven: 1983

2012-01-04T22:21:00.000-05:00

This is not a "my favorite songs from 1983" playlist. This is a "when I was eleven, this is what I listened to" mix. I even think I thought "Der Kommissar" and "Major Tom" were the same song. If I ever heard a mashup of those two, my brain might melt.

"Der Kommissar" After The Fire
"Major Tom (Coming Home)" Peter Schilling
"Break My Stride" Matthew Wilder
"I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)" Daryl Hall & John Oates
"Bang The Drum All Day" Todd Rundgren
"Steppin' Out" Joe Jackson
"She Blinded Me With Science" Thomas Dolby
"Who Can It Be Now?" Men At Work
"Only Time Will Tell" Asia
"Rosanna" Toto
"Tainted Love" Soft Cell

When I Was Ten: 1982

2012-01-04T22:14:00.000-05:00

This playlist represents what I remember about pop music just before I began to pick what I wanted to listen to for myself. Basically this is music I was exposed to by my mother, and by whatever Top 40 radio managed to break through to a boy who didn't listen to the radio yet.
I was ten years old in 1982. The mix for 1983 is much, much different.

"Gloria" Laura Branigan
"Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song" B.J. Thomas
"Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" Crystal Gayle
"When I'm Sixty-Four" is the first song I remember singing with my mother. We would go on to harmonize on several other Beatles songs, including "If I Fell"
"Elvira" Oak Ridge Boys
"Rainy Days And Mondays" The Carpenters
"Take Me Home, Country Roads" John Denver
"Danny's Song" Anne Murray
"Leaving On A Jet Plane" Peter, Paul & Mary
"Monday, Monday" The Mamas & The Papas
"Flowers on the Wall" The Statler Brothers
"The Boxer" Simon & Garfunkel
"You Should Hear How She Talks About You" Melissa Manchester
"Back In Baby's Arms" Patsy Cline
"A Boy Named Sue" Johnny Cash
"Theme From Greatest American Hero (Believe It Or Not)" Joey Scarbury

There should probably be some Ricky Nelson and Barbara Mandrell in there too- I distinctly remember their well-coiffed photos on the covers of their Greatest Hits LPs.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

2011-12-29T17:17:00.000-05:00

It's been five years since the previous Impossible Mission, and fifteen years since Ethan Hunt first ran across a movie screen. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol may not be any more memorable 5 or 15 years from now, but its humor distinguishes itself from the rest of the series. I sense that director Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) can't help himself but make the movie funny.

Overkill: 130 stories? Wouldn't a fall from 13 stories be enough to kill him?

Strangely, the stakes are much higher in this episode, while it's the funniest episode too. Ex-KGB officer Hendricks (and John Boehner lookalike Michael Nyqvist) is intent on triggering a nuclear war. Hendricks blows up the Kremlin and neatly frames Hunt in the bargain. Once again Ethan Hunt is "disavowed". Hunt's boss is literally saying goodbye when their Chevy Suburban is riddled with bullets. The driver is killed, and the SUV swerves out of control down a dark Moscow street. At this point I leaned over to my friend Adam and whispered "there's going to be a river." Sure enough, they plunge underwater, and upside down too. Why is there always a river nearby? How come when a driver is shot, the vehicle never bumps gently into a Quizno's?

That's what I call network security!

Hunt has to take his team rogue to save themselves, and the world. The team includes Simon Pegg's newly-promoted field agent/comic relief (but not too silly), and the latest young Mission Impossible ingénue, Paula Patton, who seems to have a furrow permanently dug between her brows, like she's constantly forgetting a phone number. Jeremy Renner is reluctantly tagging along, an cube-bound spook...with a secret?

So this volume was exciting, sexy, and funny. The chases were all kinda the same- The Tom Cruise Run is best taken in limited doses for maximum effectiveness. I like car chases, but I kept thinking of the Bourne movies redefinition of vehicle chases. Maybe the producers choices were limited by their paid BMW placements. I was surprised they were allowed to rip the roof off a BMW convertible! The other thrills were solid - I liked the fights and Cruise's wall-crawling. The cat-and-mouse games worked too. By the last gasp, I felt like I had seen one too many chases, and one too many fistfights. The final fight scene, between a 49-year-old man (Cruise) and the 51-year-old villain (Michael Nyqvist) stretched my credulity to the breaking point.
The movie was sexy for everyone too: Paula Patton is a handsome woman who kicks ass and changes clothes in the passenger seat of an all-electric BMW sports car/spaceship; Léa Seydoux is pure French sensuousness as a soulless, braless assassin; and Jeremy Renner wears very tight trousers throughout the movie, with several lingering butt shots, which I'm told the ladies like?

"I must have left my underwear at my last kill."

Ghost Protocol delivered exactly what I expected, but was funny on top of that. My grade? B-plus. (At the Capitol Theater, Arlington, with Adam and George)

Don't let the dealership find out about this, or you're going to void the warranty.

Odd Parallel: After Ethan Hunt successfully completes his 130-story outdoor skyscraper crawl, he reenters the hotel with his protective eye goggles still around his neck. He then immediately proceeds to begin the covert part of the mission, but Renner has to remind him to remove his goggles so the target won't see them.
Fast forward one week: I rewatched The Incredibles (one of my top movies of the last decade). Mr. Incredible prevents a few crimes on his way to his own wedding. He changes back into his tuxedo before entering the church, but his friend Fro-Zone has to remind him to remove his mask before entering the church so the guests won't see them. Just a small moment, but odd to see in two Brad Bird movies?

Looking Back

The Mission Impossible movies have been overcomplicated, humorless affairs. I have grown to appreciate the 1996 film -- I can hardly call it the "original" -- even if I probably don't understand it.

All I remember about the John Woo-directed M:I2 is Tom Cruise's long hair, a surplus of rubber masks, and some stunt motorcycle riding.

All I remember about J.J. Abrams' M:I3 is the nasty brain-exploding implant which kills Felicity
(spoiler alert!), and Philip Seymour Hoffman at his most vicious. I remember Ethan Hunt having a wife, but I could not remember who played her. Oh Michelle Monaghan, when I saw you in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, I thought you were going to break out, but you've been treading water ever since.

Concert Souvenirs?

2011-12-19T14:23:00.000-05:00

It's always nice when my favorite band releases an official live album to accompany a tour I attended. And every once in awhile an actual performance I saw is recorded and released. These days it's easier than ever for a band to make every recording available. Three concerts I went to were recorded and released on offical live albums:

"Eleanor Rigby" live at the Worcester Centrum February 9, 1990
Paul McCartney: Tripping The Live Fantastic

Unlike the contemporary trend towards releasing an entire concert from one night, McCartney recorded many dates of his 1990 tour. The resulting two-disc live album appears to select the best recording of each performance from the rigid set list. The result? The 37-track album was recorded in ninteen different cities. For example, eight tracks are from an eleven-night series at Wembley Arena, but they're from five different nights, and no two songs from the same night are presented together. I has a great time at the show (I had just turned 18, and had been a rabid Beatles fan for exactly 30 months) even if the Rolling Stone concert review spoiled all the surprises in the set-in-stone set list.
In the spring of 1990, six months before Tripping was released, while in New York City on a school trip, I visited a Greenwich Village record store and bought a three-LP bootleg recorded in Los Angeles the previous autumn. The bootleg was pressed on white vinyl with red, white, and blue spin-art designs in the vinyl. (photos to come)

Pearl Jam live at the Orpheum Theater Boston, April 12, 1994
The best rock concert I ever attended was the penultimate date of the 1994 Vs. tour. Thanks to my friend Meg (Goldstein) Chapman, who sold me her tickets. The show, when they finally started, was amazing. Mudhoney was the opening act, then there was a long interval (at least 45-60 mins) before Pearl Jam came on. I remember loving "Go" and "Animal" and the new song "Not for You". In 2011, Pearl Jam released a three-CD Deluxe Edition of Vs. including a full CD of the Orpheum show. Due to size constraints, the disc leaves out a third of the set list:

Included

Oceans
Even Flow
Sonic Reducer (Dead Boys cover)
Immortality
Glorified G
Daughter
Not For You
Rats
Blood
Release
Tremor Christ
Once
Fuckin' Up (Neil Young cover)
Dirty Frank
Rearviewmirror
Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town

Excluded

State Of Love And Trust
Hard to Imagine
Go
Animal
Alone
Better Man
Yellow Ledbetter
I've Got a Feeling (The Beatles cover).

Ben Folds Live at Avalon June 8, 2002
June 8, 2002, three months before we would meet for the first time, my future wife and I would both attend this Ben Folds solo show at the former Avalon nightclub in Boston. It was a lot of fun, even if I am not a fan of the Reinhold Messner album. The live album recorded during that tour features a photo taken at our show (I am not pictured) At least one song from the CD or limited edition bonus DVD was recorded on the night we attended.

Attack The Block

2011-12-12T12:22:00.005-05:00

A Stub Hubby on DVD review

Attack the Block is another thrilling, funny, stylish, well-crafted UK import: Goonies vs Aliens?

A gang of bored, tough-on-the-outside London teenagers defend their housing project tower block from a horde of killer beasts from outer space.

The gang, led by alpha dog Moses (50 Cent lookalike John Boyega), is in the process of mugging a young nurse Sam (Emily Mortimer lookalike Jodie Whittaker) when a meteorite crashes into a parked car. Moses is attacked by a slimy beast which emerges. Pride wounded, Moses hunts and kills the beast, but this is only the beginning. Dozens of meteorites follow, and the gang gathers a makeshift arsenal and prepare to defend their turf, while dodging the police on one side, and their tower's drug lord Hi-Hatz on the other. We're intimidated at first, but we quickly discover the gang is a bunch of goofballs who'd rather be playing FIFA on the XBox or trying to impress their would-be girlfriends than mugging; while everyone is talking and insulting each other simultaneously, I was reminded of The Goonies or E.T. Moses is the strong, silent type: Boyega exudes leadership. When Moses is arrested by two cops in a riot van, he says nothing as they tackle him and slap on the handcuffs. Moses spots one of the ravenous creatures approaching. After the cops read him his rights, he replies calmly "you better hurry up and put me in that van." Clint Eastwood couldn't have sounded cooler.

The aliens are unlike any creatures I've seen in a monster movie before. That was a big plus. The action makes effective use of the concrete jungle of the housing project, up and down the elevators, and the endless flourescent hallways.
The movie feels completely authentic to the inner-city poor Londoner experience, their attitudes, and the social dynamic is well explored within the context of the movie too.
And maybe best of all, the screenplay structure is airtight. All of the details fit together perfectly, and the internal logic of the movie all pays off in the end. The ending is realistic yet satisfying.
Attack The Block was written and directed by Brit comedy veteran Joe Cornish in his feature directing debut; he has co-adapted the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's Tinin movie (with
Steven Moffat and Edgar Wright.)
Note to my American Readers: I understood about half of the rapid-fire South London dialect. I expected this going in, so I was not surprised, and I never misunderstood a plot point because of it. If you rent it on DVD, perhaps the close captioning could help, but I'm giving this an A grade even without the benefit of complete comprehension.

Maybe George Lucas Isn't So Bad After All

2011-12-06T11:53:00.001-05:00

I watched a few minutes of Terminator: Salvation on TV this weekend (my review), and it got me thinking about creative control, and George Lucas' legacy.

I have complained that Lucas's complete creative control over the Star Wars franchise has completely smothered the whole universe. His stranglehold over the characters has prevented anything interesting or daring from happening to the series. Instead we got three terrific movies, a sixteen-year gap, then three very well-executed and polite, but lifeless "prequels." I would have preferred a wild, daring failure to a comatose failure.

Then I watched Terminator: Salvation. We can all agree that Cameron is a visionary. Terminator 1 and 2 turned out EXACTLY the way he wanted. Only Arnold returned for Terminator 3. Terminator: Salvation is the flip side of the George Lucas coin. If a movie studio has complete control over a franchise, eventually you'll get a movie which is a sequel in title only. Salvation is a competent robots vs. humans post-apocalypse chase movie, but if you change the names of the characters? Cameron's legacy might disappear entirely.

So when I see Jar Jar Binks, Baby Anakin Skywalker, or flying R2D2 on cable TV, I have to remind myself: if Lucas didn't have total control over Star Wars, 20th Century Fox would have remade and continued to sequelize the Star Wars franchise throughout the 1980s.

Maybe Star Wars would have ended up like James Bond: some good, some bad, but immortal and evolving.
OR, maybe Lucas's stale, airless prequels are the best possible outcome? WE WILL NEVER KNOW.

Related on STUB HUBBY

Phantom Menace review [1999]
Attack of the Clones review [2002]
Revenge of the Sith review [2005]
Commentary: Best and Most Successful Sequels of All Time
Commentary: Summer Sequels & Remakes: The Worst
Stub Hubby List Simply Disarming: Limbs (Original and Robotic) Removed in the Star Wars Movies
1970s Hubby Perspective: The Death of Obi-Wan Kenobi

The Descendants

2011-11-29T11:09:00.000-05:00

To paraphrase Dickens: "The wife is dying to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that."
George Clooney's wife is in a coma, she's not going to come out of it, and his "limping towards divorce" marriage is suddenly turned upside down. A few tears, yes, but not Terms Of Endearment waterworks. Hijinks do not ensue either.
A lukewarm meditiation on death, grief, marriage, and parenthood.
A fine nuanced performance from George Clooney, and solid performances from the young cast help balance the meandering plot. It's not tragic enough to be a drama, not soapy enough to be a melodrama, and not silly enough to be a comedy. The movie never ties together tonally or thematically. It feels like the movie was allowed to wander away from director Alexander Payne. Perhaps spending nine months locked in an editing suite with your movie caused him to lose perspective?

The movie is set in Hawaii, which adds great texture, and contributes to the plot too... but Payne goes totally overboard with the Hawaiian ukelele music on the soundtrack. You know how a tourist might visit Texas for a week and believe that cowboy boots and fringed shirts are suddenly terrific-- until they get home to Connecticut and realize how dumb they look walking through Hartford looking like Roy Rogers? I picture Payne falling in love with Hawaiian music -- which is lovely in small doses -- and eventually every moment of the film is plastered with midtempo uke strumming + ululating vocals.

Shailene Woodley, 20, is fine as George's teenage daughter, but I hope the Oscar talk is just hype. If the Academy wants invent an honorary Exciting Newcomer award, great, but she's not some revelation.
The Stub Hubby Grade: C-plus.

Stub Hubby Reviews Alexander Payne:

Christian Marclay: THE CLOCK

2011-11-18T11:27:00.000-05:00

Synopsis from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston:

"The Clock (2010), an ode to time and cinema, comprises thousands of fragments from a range of films that create a 24-hour...video. The Clock tells the accurate time at any given moment, and wherever it is screened it is synchronized to the local time zone, so that it is literally a working time piece."

Four shots from the movie. There are NOT multiple screens
simultaneously, and the movie is not all close-ups of clock
faces. It's much more complex and amazing.

Here's what happened: I entered the theater at 10:55am. Onscreen was a clip from a movie where the time is 10:55am. The clips continue from 10:55am, to 10:56am, and so on. Not every minute is necessarily depicted onscreen, but almost all. More importantly, it stays in sync, so clips of 11:00am begin at 11:00am.

Each clip includes a clock, watch, or someone mentioning the time. Each instance of the time matches the current time I'm watching the film. Each clip is long enough to put the instance of the time in context, but rarely with any context for the plot of the movie from which it is taken.

Sometimes the time in the scene is the subject of the scene: "What time is it?" or "I'm going to be late!" and so on. Other times, there's merely a clock in the background of the shot.

What elevates this project from antiseptic obsessive-compulsive symptom to art is HOW the clips interact with each other. It's not merely the appropriate scenes edited in order. Marclay made choices:

To smooth the transitions between scenes, the background "soundscape" and/or incidental music from one scene often continues after the visual ends. Sometimes it's just the street sounds, birds chirping, or, appropriately, a clock ticking.
Characters from different clips will seem to be joined together: Johnny Depp talks to someone offscreen. We cut to Vivien Leigh demurely smiling back at him. We cut again to a dog, probably from Depp's original scene, and back to Depp again.
An bell will ring in one movie, and a character will pop out of bed in another movie.
A scene will begin, then three unrelated clips will play, then we'll return to the original scene, a little later on, as if the original scene were taking place concurrently with the three imbetween. This is a editing technique called "parallel action" which we take for granted until clips gathered from the whole universe of cinema are edited together.
Because it's assembled from nearly a century of filmmaking (from Buster Keaton to Jason Statham, I swear to God) the quality of the visuals varies wildly from scene to scene, but we're so hard-wired to trust the editor, it hardly matters.

Marclay's chosen one piece of the moving picture storytelling universe and discarded everything else. This eliminates all plot from the movie, but he could have accomplished the same thing by making a 24-hour-long montage of people eating in the movies, or people climbing stairs, or cursing. That would accomplish the goal of observing the art of cinema detached from the story and stars and music itself. Marclay's goal is larger than that. In a strange way, removing the plot and focusing on time reveals the plot of life as it is: not the things we do, or the things which happen to us, but rather everything which happens in between. Time is passing by us and through us every moment of our lives, whether we are paying attention to it or not. This movie, by moving Humphrey Bogart, Glenn Close, and Michael J. Fox to the background and placing their wristwatches, Big Ben, and alarm clocks in the foreground, reminds us that everything we've accomplished, everything we hold dear, and all our favorite memories, all happened while time was passing.

It's truly weird to watch a movie where you don't have to check your watch to see
what time it is. I knew I wanted to watch until 11am that day. I simply had to wait
until the movie WAS 11:00am.

This art can be easily sustained for a few minutes: the YouTube is full of "supercuts". THE CLOCK lasts for 24 hours. My Stub Hubby Grade: A-plus.

It's playing all day every day at the MFA through New Year's Eve. I strongly recommend checking it out for an hour or two. I have seen 10:55 through 11:35 on one occasion, and 10:20 through 10:55am the next time.

RELATED: Jennifer Bruni on THE CLOCK
VIDEO: BBC feature on THE CLOCK [seven minutes]

J. Edgar

2011-11-13T12:21:00.000-05:00

J. Edgar is a meticulously crafted and compelling portrait of an ambitious, petty, vindictive, paranoid, ugly little man who created powerful and modern F.B.I. while consolidating his power with intimidation, surveillance, and blackmail.

Hoover arresting Bruno Hauptmann, the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby

At the same time, Hoover (DiCaprio) lives at home, Norman Bates-style, with his domineering, zealot mother (Judi Dench) and works and dines each day with his life partners: his secretary-for-life Helen Gandy (superb Naomi Watts) and his second-in-command/perfect specimen of manhood/daily "companion" Clyde Tolson (gorgeous Armie Hammer).

The movie is framed by 1960s Hoover telling his life story to a series of FBI ghostwriters. It's an old screenwriting tool, but it was inobtrusive.

(NOTE: The framing device reminded me immediately Attenborough's CHAPLIN biopic. NOTE: While this isn't covered in the movie, Hoover had Chaplin de facto deported from the US in 1952. Read more here.)

The movie shifts regularly between Hoover's 1930s heyday and the 1960s. What was amazing and clever about it was how organic and non-confusing these shifts were. Obviously, the makeup and costumes made it obvious when we were shifting time periods, but these shifts always felt natural to the storytelling. Dustin Lance Black's screenplay may be the strongest part of the movie.

The old age makeup was amazing, but I still feel it was a mistake to cast DiCaprio as Hoover. DiCaprio is a terrific actor, but DiCaprio is too young and too handsome to play Hoover. The makeup was terrific, but they had to work too hard to make one of our most handsome actors look like one of our Top 10 Ugliest Pubilc Servants of All Time. DiCaprio turned 37 on 11/11/11, but he plays Hoover from age 24 to 87.

Whenever Hoover would have a romantic dinner with his life parter Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), I would marvel at how smooth and beautiful Armie Hammer was. The DiCaprio would appear, with oily, badly cut hair, heavy black eyebrows, and pockmarks. It was too much!

Director Clint Eastwood always makes classy, efficient, un-fussy movies, and this is no exception. I grew a little weary of the heavily color-corrected/desaturated look of the movie. Using computers to effect the color palette of movies has been popular for over a decade-- O'Brother Where Art Thou? was a trailblazer-- but I worry that the desaturated look will become a cliche'd trademark of this era. I suspect, 30 years from now, while watching Minority Report or Traffic, future moviegoers will say "Oh, this must be from the Aughts! Look at how de-colorized it is!"

Hauptmann

Clint's respect and clout means he can get great actors in every role, and this cast was Character Actor Hall of Fame:

Jeffrey Donovan (from BURN NOTICE) played RFK. Did you know he's from Amesbury, MA?
Zach Grenier
Jessica Hecht
Ken Howard
Josh Lucas as Charles Lindbergh
Dermot Mulroney
Stephen Root
Lea Thompson
also:
Damon Herriman looks EXACTLY like Bruno Hauptmann, the man who kidnapped the Lindbergh baby.
Christopher Shyer doesn't look like Nixon, but he got the cursing just right.
Even Ed Westwick from Gossip Girl was in it!

Also On Stub Hubby:
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio

Directed by Clint Eastwood

The Fugitive

2011-11-09T14:30:00.001-05:00

The Fugitive (1993) is the Casablanca of action thrillers. It could have been an unremarkable studio product, just another recycled genre script with an A-list star plugged into the lead. Instead, some kind of wonderful chemistry took place and the result is a rightfully celebrated classic. A crackling adventure with a terrific cast.

Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) is thoracic surgeon Richard Kimble, wrongfully convicted of killing his wife. Harrison Ford is our best physical actor- he struggles, runs, climbs, and punches more realistically than anyone. He punches the bad guy like a real person would. When Kimble has nearly drowned in an icy river after a daring free-jump over a waterfall, his exhausted slog onto the riverbank is totally believeable. I also love that Ford grew an actual beard and actually shaved it off while on the run. Bravo to real facial hair!

Tommy Lee Jones saves what could have been a boring U.S. Marshal and won an Oscar. I am certain that his part on paper is pretty flat. Lots of actors could have been hired who would bring nothing to the table. Jones' Deputy Gerard is determined, rude, colorful, and fair. The close-knit working relationship between Gerard and his team felt lived-in and real. I love it when characters share inside jokes which aren't explained to us. The eccentric costuming of his posse is a little distracting, but maybe that's partially the antiquated 1990s at work?

To further bolster my premise: Harrison Ford made The Fugitive between his two Jack Ryan movies, Patriot Games and Clear & Present Danger. I am sure those movies made tons of money, but no one cares about them the way people remember The Fugitive. There's no reason on paper why The Fugitive should be any better than either of them, but I dare you to find someone who'd rank Patriot Games or Clear & Present Danger higher?

The Fugitive was directed by Andrew Davis. Davis was nominated for a Golden Globe and a DGA award for Best Director. At Oscar time, The Fugitive was nominated for Best Picture, Sound, Score, Editing, Effects, and Cinematography, but Davis was passed over for a Best Director nom (he would have lost to Steven Spielberg [Schindler's List] anyway).

Davis makes competent action thrillers: before The Fugitive, he'd directed six features, including The Package (with Gene Hackman) and Under Siege (aka Die Hard on a Battleship, with Steven Seagal).
Since The Fugitive, he's directed six unremarkable features.

Yes, we all wore chambray shirts in the 1990s. And yes, that is Jane Lynch!

Besides the memorable "train crashes into a bus" which kicks off the chase, the movie is chock-a-block with additional action sequences. The effects are above average throughout- the train crash still looks good. The exception which proves the rule: there's one shot in the sequence where Kimble is driving an ambulance towards the dam, while being pursued by Gerard in a helicopter. It's an establishing shot with the road in the foreground, a tunnel opening in the middle distance, and the dam, with water flowing over it, in the distance. It's clearly a composite shot of some kind, but the waterfall is super-grainy (that's typical) but the waterfall is also A STILL PHOTO! How could this happen? My guess is that Davis discovered he needed this shot in the editing room, long after location photography was complete? Maybe one of his assistant directors shot the required footage, but it was faulty? Thankfully the shot is brief, but thanks to home video, we can linger over it and shake our heads.

I found an unsealed DVD copy at a tag sale for $1 last month. You can pick up The Fugitive at Amazon.com:

Watch it again tonight. You won't regret it. My grade: A-plus

He only had one word of dialog in this movie, but yelling "Kimble!"
at Harrison Ford is pretty awesome, even if
you are immediately shot and killed.

Moore is 32 years old in this photo, but looks 22!

WATCH FOR: Brief appearances by Julianne Moore, Jane Lynch, John Cusack's father Dick Cusack (as Kimble's attorney), Neil Flynn (the janitor on Scrubs) and NBC News anchor Lester Holt!

MORE Harrison Ford movies on STUB HUBBY:

Seventies Easy Rock

2011-11-08T11:39:00.000-05:00

Also known as "Yacht Rock", this is another great mix from my wife.

1.    “Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)” Jim Croce
2.    “How Much I Feel” Ambrosia
3.    “On and On” Stephen Bishop
4.    “Sara Smile” Daryl Hall & John Oates
5.    “After the Love Has Gone” Earth, Wind & Fire
6.    “Dance with Me” Orleans
7.    “We'll Never Have to Say Goodbye Again”, and
8.    “I'd Really Love to See You Tonight”
England Dan & John Ford Coley
9.    “I Keep Forgettin'” Michael McDonald
10.    “This Is It” Kenny Loggins
11.    “Just Remember I Love You” Firefall
12.    “Sailing” Christopher Cross
13.    “Summer Breeze” Seals & Crofts
14.    “I Love a Rainy Night” Eddie Rabbitt
15.    “Steal Away” Robbie Dupree
16.    “Lotta Love” Nicolette Larson
17.    “Arthur's Theme” [live] Christopher Cross
18.    “Baby Come Back” Player
19.    “Listen to the Music” The Doobie Brothers
20.    “Take It Easy” [live & acoustic] Jackson Browne

Moneyball

2011-10-29T13:24:00.000-04:00

Who knew you could make a compelling movie about statistics?

I am not a statistics expert, but I love sharing interesting baseball stats so much, that I struck a deal with my wife: I only share ONE interesting baseball stat per week from the Boston Sunday Globe's Baseball coverage. While reading the MONEYBALL book, I had to limit myself to one tidbit per chapter. Lots of tongue-biting going on.

MONEYBALL the movie is also interesting and well-told, even if there isn't a lot of plot. A baseball career as a metaphor for life isn't a new idea, but Brad Pitt is compelling playing Athletics GM Billy Beane, a grown-up real person who's coming to terms with the good and bad choices in his past, while he makes similar "life choices" for the life of his baseball team. Who better to discover that the team need to turn its back on tradition than a man who learned too late that he wasn't meant to be a traditional baseball player?

Jonah Hill (right) does not play a passive-aggressive
bitter rageaholic in this movie, for a change.

Making changes to a baseball team is like u-turning a cruise ship: you can't expect to see results right away. It's convenient for the plot of the movie that the same season that Beane makes his radical changes to the Athletics, the team caps that season with a dramatic winning streak, featuring of Beane's radical Moneyball choices, newbie first baseman Scott Hatteberg (the terrific Chris Pratt). Maybe less convenient for the movie (and the Moneyball philosophy as a whole)? In the following decade, the Athletics have won 90 games only four times (with three playoff appearances).

Brad Pitt deserves some award recogition for his quiet, deep portrayal of a mid-life... well, it's not a crisis, more of a mid-life re-evaluation. Also, it's nice to see Pitt playing a guy who wears polo shirts and drives an SUV. Has he ever played an ordinary dad before? Anyone? My grade: B-plus (Somerville Theater, during the Halloween Snowstorm, with my wife)

MORE Brad Pitt movies on STUB HUBBY

The Rum Diary

2011-10-28T13:47:00.000-04:00

A shaggy-dog story; an overheated and drunk dog too. Wildly colorful, joyfully verbose and splattered with insults, casual racism, potent sexuality, and dreranged fervor. At the center is the relatively stable Johnny Depp as dissolute journalist Paul Kemp, his latest love letter to author Hunter S Thompson.
Mixed in with the drunken adventures in the Third World is Kemp's mild outrage at corporate imperialism exploiting the native population and environment. If it weren't for Kemp's occasional railing against the inevitable, there'd be no plot at all. His moral fiber is the only thing he seems to care about, and it seems inorganic.
Aaron Eckhart is really good at playing the charming dick, it's too bad there's no other side to his character.
Amber Heard has a classic beauty, which is fully explored here. I'm hopeful she can leverage her beauty, Charlize Theron style, but the jury's still out.

With Johnny Depp's relatively restrained antics at the center, Richard Jenkins, Giovanni Ribisi, and Michael Rispoli are able to unspool their id completely, to much comic effect. If Depp where more zany, the film would resemble an unlocked monkey cage.
I wasn't expecting any more that what I've described, and Johnny Depp is such a charming and loveable comic actor, that I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. My grade: B-plus! (Harvard Square Church St Screen 1, with George and Adam)

Dr. No

2011-10-27T16:42:00.000-04:00

Watching Dr. No (1962), the first James Bond movie, on DVD this week, I was struck by the plot which didn't make any sense, and the cliches which make taking the movie seriously in 2011 impossible.
We begin in Jamaica. Professor Strangways, the man we later learn is the British Intelligence agent in the Kingston office, is killed. While walking to his car at the gentlemen's club, he's caught off guard by three Jamaican thugs posing as blind beggars. They shoot him in the back with pistols equipped with silencers. Suddenly, their getaway car roars around the bend to whisk the body away. Their getaway car is a hearse (get it?) but it makes so much noise, with tires squealing and the engine roaring, that the hearse negates the stealthy silencers? This is only the first example of terrible "foley" sound effects. This is one of those 1960s movies where you can clearly hear every footstep CLIP clop CLIP clop...

Moments later, at Strangways' office, his secretary dials in the shortwave radio for the daily bulletin to London when the thugs arrive. Weirdly, one of the thugs, standing outside French doors, breaks a pane of glass with the barrel of his silencer-equipped pistol, then shoots her? Why pre-break the glass?

Breaking the glass makes noise, so why are you using a silencer?
There's no need to pre-break the glass; the bullet will do that on its way through!

We learn later that these attacks were ordered by genius megalomaniac Dr. No, in order to prevent Strangways from learning more about his nuclear-powered stronghold on Crab Key. However, the manner of the deaths looks very suspicious to M, so he sends Bond to Kingston to investigate.
Even before he leaves the airport, he's lured into a trap- another thug poses as a chauffeur. Bond immediately discovers the ruse, and, for the first of many times in the Bond franchise, he lets himself be trapped in order to hunt the hunter and get some answers.
As Bond rides in the convertible (with another car following) across Jamaica, we are treated to some nice location shooting, including footage of Sean Connery shot from a car-mounted camera rig. Remember this for later.

The next attempt on his life is death by tarantula, a rightfully memorably scary scene...but how exactly do you murder someone with a tarantula? Bond is sleeping in his hotel suite. The advantage of a tarantula is that you don't have to physically enter the suite- the spider can slip in through a window. BUT tarantulas aren't predatory carnivores who crave hot blood! If you drop a spider in a hotel suite, are they inclined to seek out bodies in beds and bite them to death? OR you could place the tarantula in the bed with Bond BUT if you're able to break into his suite and get close enough to Bond's bed, why bother with the spider? As Scott Evil said in Austin Powers, just shoot him!
In the course of Bond's investigation, he determines that there's a leak between the Intelligence office in Kingston and Dr. No. Bond immediately suspects foxy secretary Miss Taro. Did James Bond invent the "He knows she's a spy, and she knows he knows, but neither admits it" dynamic? Bond gets himself invited to Miss Taro's bungalow, basically inviting her to try to kill him.

As Bond drives his convertible up into the hills of Jamaica to pick her up, Miss Taro phones the hearse-driving thug to run him off the road. Bond is chased around the twisty dirt mountain roads by the hearse. All of the footage of Bond being pursued by the hearse feature Connery fake-driving against a rear-projection of the hearse following, intercut with location footage of stunt drivers. How come they used a car-mounted camera rig to shoot Connery on location earlier, but this chase is filmed in a studio? To make it worse, the foley sound effects are of cars skidding on asphalt, not dirt or gravel.
Once Connery arrives at the bungalow-- Miss Taro never expected him to make it-- he seduces her, and they have sex. She consents in order to delay Bond long enough to give another of Dr. No's agents a chance to arrive and kill Bond. Bond sleeps with her to give the local office time to arrive and arrest her. He could have just arrested her personally, and held her at gunpoint until the cops arrived, but no, he basically slept with her out of spite. She spits in his face as she's taken away.

Eventually Bond lands secretly on Dr. No's Crab Key, site of his nuclear-powered NASA-sabotaging SPECTRE Evil Lair. He is captured along with local beauty and simpleton Honey Rider (Ursula Andress; voice looped by Nikki Van der Zyl) I don't think I am being racist or sexist to say her character is written as an ignorant savage.
Bond and Honey are escorted into the bunker, scrubbed clean of decontamination in a lengthy "watch our movie stars shower" sequence, then locked in a deluxe suite of cells. The set design for the underground lair is terrific. Very authentic 1960s brutalist design on a large scale, with sleek modern furniture. They're served coffee in their suite, which is spiked with knockout drops. Poisoned drinks are a common trope in mystery stories, but why Dr. No chose to knock them out after they've been captured and neutralized is the real mystery. Is this just a dirty trick? They wake up in their feather beds, so unless Dr. No was taking embarrassing photos of them while they slept, there seems to be no logic to it.

Next is the "dinner with the megalomaniac" scene. Dr. No is a Chinese expat, played by a Canadian actor Joseph Wiseman, with latex hoods over his eyelids, a plain grey Dr Evil tunic, and glossy black robot hands. It's really hard to take him seriously in this post-Austin Powers era. As part of SPECTRE, he is assigned to jam radio signals for the latest NASA rocket in order to crash it into the Atlantic. Bond continually baits Dr. No in an attempt to rattle him, but it doesn't work. Dr. No eventually sends Honey off with the security thugs, hinting that he'll permit some old fashioned gang-raping before they kill her.
Instead of killing Bond, as he had tried to do throughout the movie, he locks him in a cell. The cell has a air vent measuring at least 2 feet by 3 feet. The grate blocking the vent is electrified, but Bond only has to take one zap before he can jostle the grate free and escape.

If your workplace has a sign like this, maybe it's time to refresh your resume.
Maybe something less "radiation-y" would suit you better?

Bond survives several drenchings of water, one of which might be red hot nuclear coolant? I am not sure why Bond didn't mutate into Radioactive Bond? And why is the ventilation system and drain system the same set of pipes? Bond manages to disable a nuclear engineer, steal his coverall radiation suit (which nicely obscures his identity) then makes his way to the nuclear reactor just in time to force a core meltdown and foil Dr. No's plot. In the following pandemonium, Dr. No drowns in the coolant tank, Bond saves Honey from drowning in the rising tides, and they escape the island before the reactor blows up.

134 Mayhem

2011-10-27T15:46:00.000-04:00

"Twenty-Five Miles" Edwin Starr (1969), or, as my wife put it, "that song from Adventures In Babysitting"
"Junk Of The Heart (Happy)" The Kooks
"Cold Comfort Flowers" Fountains of Wayne
"Hammer And A Nail" Indigo Girls
Upon listening to "Careful" by Guster last month, I was immediately reminded of "Hammer and a Nail"
"Mayhem" great muscular arrangement and sassy vocals by Imelda May.
Eurythmics "Would I Lie To You?" This song (from Be Yourself Tonight) has always been one of my favorite rave-up fast driving songs. I found this extended edit on a 12 inch single. As far as I can tell, it's the same mix as the LP, but it doesn't fade out until 25 seconds later.
Pearl Jam "Jeremy" [2009 Remix] Thinking about this song a lot lately as "Pumped Up Kicks" has been all over the airwaves.
Gomez: "How We Operate" I love the loud-and-soft dynamics. Reminds me of Led Zeppelin?
"Lost In My Mind" The Head And The Heart
"Ramble On" Led Zeppelin
"It's Only Natural" Crowded House
"Stripped" A cover of the Depeche Mode song from Duncan Sheik's Eighties Covers LP.
"Outta Mind (Outta Sight)" Wilco
"Candy" from Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers' MOJO LP.
"For You Blue" The Beatles
"She Walks In So Many Ways" As soon as I heard this new Jayhawks song on the radio, I immediately knew (by the two-part harmonies) that it was the Jayhawks, and I knew I wanted to buy it!
"As for Now" Another "thanks to SoundHound" find. This song by newcomer Lindsay Rae Spurlock (the EP is called Heart On) was featured on the Adult Swim show Childrens Hospital. I held my smartphone up to the speaker, triggered SoundHound, and her name popped up!
David Bowie "Modern Love" Nile Rodgers is one of my favorite producers, definitely my favorite producer of the 1980s. Love his drum sound.
The Cadillacs "Speedo" Recently picked up the soundtrack CD for...anyone, anyone? GoodFellas.
"You're The Inspiration" At the Beelzebubs' chapel show at Tufts Homecoming Weekend, the Bubs performance of this Chicago classic (from Chicago 17) was a highlight. Of course, the song is old enough to be the prom theme of the Beelzebubs' parents! Aiee!

Q&A: The Stub Hubby on Gwyneth Paltrow

2011-08-31T10:54:00.007-04:00

ABOVE: Gwyneth after consuming
a non-organic soy latte.

Transcript of an actual conversation this weekend...
Question: Do you want to see the new movie Contaigon?
Me: The movie looks a little grim to me, but I would pay $10 to see Gwyneth Paltrow die horribly.
Q: Because she's a bad actress?
Me: Because she's the new Martha Stewart, an amazingly smug out-of-touch millionaire. I'm sure your $500 coffeemaker works great...
Q: She talks about all that food, yet she's bulimic thin.
Me: If you had a full-time personal trainer, you too could eat 10,000 calories a day and stay thin...
Q: ...who also helps her with the vomiting.
Me: Don't be ridiculous, she has a separate person dedicated for that. You don't want your trainer holding your hair for you while you puke.
(Later I felt bad because Matt Damon, who I actually respect, plays her husband in the movie, and I hate to see fictional Matt Damon lose his fictional wife to bird flu...even if the wife is played by Gwyneth Paltrow.)
Gwyneth, previously on STUB HUBBY

Fun Fact About A Movie I'm Not Going To See

2011-08-29T10:54:00.001-04:00

Our Idiot Brother was directed by Jesse Peretz, the original bass player for The Lemonheads. I thought the trailer had an early 90s, post-punk power pop vibe...

Land of the Undead Movie Web Site

2011-08-27T13:34:00.004-04:00

While writing a joke for my post about Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I Googled "deep blue sea" looking for a picture of Sam Jackson getting bitten in half by the shark. The first result simply said

D E E P B L U E S E A

and I immediately knew, based on the extra spaces between the letters, that this must be the original web site from 1999. I was not disappointed.
Visiting the site was like stepping back in time, to a more innocent era, before Y2K, when Windows 95 was preferable to Windows 98, when getting a free email account was still novel.
I am convinced that this site is still up and running --well, shambling along is more like it-- because no one still works at Warner Bros who remembers the login and password to edit the site.

Put on your spleunker's helmet and join me as I explore some of the relics. Or, if you're feeling adventurous, take a look for yourself. Just tell a friend where you're going in case you get lost...D E E P B L U E S E A

The home page lets you choose between the Full Site (requires Flash) or the "Lite Site" for you folks with dial up
The home page link for Warner Brothers Pay Per View is dead
The home page link for legal/privacy info link is dead. Let's loot the place!
The link to Deep Blue Sea message boards is dead
The link to DBS Web Cards is dead. I think "Web Cards" were kind of like those E-Cards you send to your wonderful aunt who still has an aol.com email address.
The interviews with director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger) are available as streaming Realtime or downloadable Quicktime. Realtime is the work of the devil, and I don't have QT installed, so I don't dare click on them.
The soundtrack is available for purchase at CDNow.com CDNow.com is gone.
"Build your own Deep Blue Sea home page. Go to Acme City to pick up a bunch of free pictures and other items, and go to work. Best make it water-tight, though." I think this was an attempt to help you build your own fansite on Geocities or something: "Hopelessly Devoted To Deep Blue Sea"? I think we call that "viral marketing" now.. (ps that Acme City link is dead.)
Four of the six external links for fun facts about sharks still work!
What would happen to my 2011 Lenovo laptop if I downloaded and installed a 1999 screen saver from the movie Deep Blue Sea? I'm not going to find out.

Two more thoughts:

Samuel L. Jackson is like one of those kids' games where you take a bald head and add glasses, beards, random haircuts...

Saffron Burrows in a bikini.

NOTE: I'm sorry that the title of this post mixes two horror genres- the zombie movie with the shark movie, but the web site as zombie image fit the best, and now that I think about it, where are all the zombie shark movies? Do I have to all the thinking for you, Hollywood?

Premise Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-24T13:23:00.000-04:00

I'm breaking new ground on Stub Hubby. I'm not reviewing Rise of the Planet of the Apes (RotPotA.) I have not seen RotPotA. I'm reviewing the premise of RotPotA, based on what I've seen in the trailer. (the gorilla leaping into the helicopter is pretty badass, right?)

James Franco as a non-stoned scientist: Maybe I've seen Pineapple Express too many times, but I' having trouble picturing James Franco as a working professional of any kind. I keep expecting him to say "wait, what are we talking about?" then run into the woods.

Curing Alzheimer's Disease: The therapy used on the chimpanzee Caesar makes him super smart. Weren't the scientists in Deep Blue Sea trying to use super-smart sharks to develop a cure for Alzheimer's too? And how did that idea turn out for Samuel L. Jackson? I guess James Franco's scientist hasn't seen Deep Blue Sea, or does RotPotA exist in a parallel, yet eerily similar universe where the movie Deep Blue Sea was never made? (spooky music)
The End Game: This is why I'm not going to see this movie. There aren't enough primates in San Francisco to sucessfully "rise" to a whole Planet of the Apes. What's the outcome? Caesar magically synthesizes more magic gas, FedExes it to every zoo in America, a few more to Africa, and suddenly homo sapiens are on the run? Let's set our goals more realistically. Maybe the movie should be called Rise of the Neighborhood of the Apes, or Rise of the Bitchin Treehouse of the Apes. That's a movie I can get behind.

The Outsiders

2011-08-18T15:32:00.170-04:00

Another August, another movie in the outdoors. Last year it was Better Off Dead. This summer, thanks to Somerville's SomerMovie Fest, it's Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders!
Our protagonists are the youngest teens in a gang of "greaser" juvenile delinquents: alpha dog Patrick Swayze, loose cannon Matt Dillon, and goofball Emilio Estevez. When Johnny (Ralph Macchio) kills a "soc" in self-defense to save Ponyboy's life (C. Thomas Howell), they go on the run, literally jumping a freight out of town. While Johnny and Ponyboy hide out and dare to dream of escaping their fate in a world where greasers have nowhere to go...oh, hell, I am struggling not to quote Springsteen lyrics here.
Just listen to "Born To Run" while reading Romeo & Juliet, and you've got the gist.

The movie perfectly nails the melodramatic seriousness with which teens color their lives. "No one understands me", "I'm never going to make it out of here", "I just want to escape to where nobody knows me", these are common ideas for 14 year olds, and they take them deathly seriously. While it's true that Johnny did kill someone, he's living a nearly feral life with a complete absence of parents or a nurturing presence. He has no perspective on reality, and like any gang member, he believes that no one outside of the gang will ever believe in him. It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap, etc, etc...
Like an All-Star, big-budget Afterschool Special, The Outsiders pushes its points home way too hard. The syrupy music and treacly theme song (sung by Stevie Wonder) from Carmine Coppola are eye-rollingly bad. I also felt the pacing was really choppy. It's rare that I think a bad movie should be longer, but, at 91 minutes, the plot and characterization felt rushed.

The Outsiders is the cradle of the Brat Pack. It's almost distracting when nearly every role is filled with a movie star. Besides Macchio, Howell, Swayze, Dillon, and Estevez, Tom Cruise and Rob Lowe both have a few lines, Diane Lane is the good girl from the rich side of town, and Leif Garrett is alpha dog "soc".

C. Thomas Howell is probably the least famous of the Pack. He was one of the bicycle gang in E.T. the previous year, and after The Outsiders, he went on a run of high-profile features: Red Dawn, Secret Admirer, The Hitcher, and Soul Man. After that, he never lacked for work: he's appeared in nearly 100 movies, TV movies, and TV series...almost none of which I've ever heard of. Starting in 2009, he's portrayed an grizzled, graying alcoholic LAPD officer on the best cop drama on TV, Southland (right). He's 44 now, and looking lean and lined

As I discussed last week, I never saw this movie as a kid. I also never read S.E. Hinton's novels, maybe my school district didn't include them in the curriculum? Anyway, it's always interesting to contrast a fond nostalgic perspective (my wife and our friends Amy and Katherine) with my fresh view, especially for a movie aimed at adolescents. I'm not ready to close the book on this movie just yet. It's hardly ideal viewing conditions watching a movie on a scratchy DVD, sitting on a baseball infield, with barking dogs, killer mosquitoes, and a streetlamp in your eyes. It turns out the movie I saw IS too short: Coppolla has released a "Complete Novel" cut of the film on DVD. It's 22 minutes longer, with a different beginning, ending, and six Elvis Presley songs added to the soundtrack. Perhaps I'll give this one another shot. I'll do it for Johnny! (at Hodgkins Park, Somerville, with Emily, Amy, and Katherine)

OTHER COPPOLA FILMS on Stub Hubby:

My 1983 In Review

2011-08-17T15:14:00.004-04:00

My wife and I love many of the same movies, which makes all the more jarring when I admit I have never seen one of her favorites.

"How could you have never seen that movie?!" she'll ask me.

I usually point out the gender gap. "Of course I never saw Dirty Dancing. I was a 15 year old BOY when that came out." Then my wife gently teases me for growing up without cable TV. It's true: My wife has always had HBO, but I didn't have cable until I was 20.
This week we're seeing another movie which falls into the gap: The Outsiders, which apparently is a rite of passage for Gen X girls in the 1980s, but I have never seen it. Now our friends are piling on too, so I've bolstered my defense. What movies WAS I seeing back when The Outsiders came out? (NOTE: I was 11 years old in 1983.) I Googled "Top box office 1983" (The Outsiders ranks 28th).

Here's a sampling of 1983 movies I saw in the theater that year INSTEAD of The Outsiders, OR, movies I saw on TV/videotape in the following years.

Return of the Jedi
WarGames A movie about hacking into the NORAD supercomputer? What's taken them so long to remake this?
Octopussy besides the giant lapels and terrible double entendres, the most memorable scene is when Bond plays a two-person video game versus the Louis Jordan, the super-fey villain- a game which administers electric shocks as penalties. Maud Adams is one of the least sexy Bond "girls" (she was 38 when the movie came out)
Never Say Never Again: thanks to a convoluted legal loophole, Warner Brothers was able to remake Thunderball even though the rights to the James Bond characters and stories were held by a different company. This resulted in two competing Bond movies released four months apart. NSNA featured one of my favorite Bond girls, Kim Basinger, and one of the least intimidating villains, Klaus Maria Brandauer.
Risky Business: a staple of any adolescent boy's initial exposure to sex and debauchery in the 1980s.
I estimate I saw National Lampoon's Vacation 1,392 times in the 1980s. I could write a whole essay on the "edited for TV" version of the film and how it differs from the theatrical release.
Superman III is the hybrid Superman/Richard Pryor comedy. Gene Hackman wisely sat this one out. Notable only for the creepy meta-battle between Clark Kent and evil "Tar" Superman.
Blue Thunder, the super-cool police helicopter movie. The movie stars Roy Scheider, with Daniel Stern as his copilot. There was a short-lived Blue Thunder TV series the following year (only 11 episodes) starring James Farentino and Dana Carvey as his copilot. Don't confuse Blue Thunder with Airwolf, the OTHER super-helicopter TV show. Airwolf also debuted in January 1984, but outlasted Blue Thunder (three seasons!)
I am very fond of Krull, one of many fantasy movies riding on the Star Wars coattails. There are some legitimately exciting and scary sequences, and a novel sci-fi premise too, but mostly it's a very musty English cross-country voyage, like The Fellowship of the Ring with less location shooting.

Liam Neeson appears to be wearing a rat tail, three belts, and Simon LeBon's leather vest from the "Wild Boys" video, as a nobel thief in KRULL

133 Paradise by The "C"

2011-08-11T10:51:00.000-04:00

"Cissy Strut" The Meters (1969) The squeaky hi-hat pedal is practically it's own instrument!
"Stranded In A Limousine" Paul Simon, a 'new' song from his Greatest Hits, etc. (1977)
"Options" Gomez
"Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win" Beastie Boys featuring Santigold this terrific song from Hot Sauce Committee Part Two is my nominee for Summer Song of 2011, but I think Lady Gaga's "Edge of Glory" may have edged them out.
"Gimme All Your Lovin" ZZ Top
"Rumour Has It" I didn't dream that Adele could equal the power of "Rolling in the Deep", but she did! I was blown away when I first heard this on the radio.The lyrics! drums! handclaps! backing vocals! Wow.
"Hangman Jury" Aerosmith
and
"Barton Hollow" The Civil Wars, two swampy songs together.
"I'm A King Bee" The Rolling Stones, as heard on the cop show Memphis Beat. A brief aside: Memphis Beat (starring Jason Lee as a Memphis PD detective by day, blues singer by night) is an old-school cop/detective show. It feels like an old Simon & Simon episode. But, they spend a lot of money on music clearances for bands like The Rolling Stones. Actually, now that I think of it, Jason Lee's last show, My Name Is Earl, had lots of brand-name rock music too.
"Monday Monday" Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs, or, as we sing it to our son: "Mango Mango"
"If You Love Somebody (Set Them Free)" This William Orbit remix removes all of Sting's jazz trappings in favor of a synth-heavy dance groove. All of Brandford Marsalis's saxophone is gone.
"Just Another Night" I heard this Ian Hunter song, from his LP You're Never Alone With A Schizophrenic, and thought it sounded like a Bruce Springsteen song. Turns out I'm half right: the recording features Roy Bittan (keyboards) Garry Tallent (bass) and Max Weinberg (drums) from the E Street band.
"Freeway of Love" [Extended Remix] Aretha Franklin featuring Clarence Clemons - One of Clarence's best guest spots.
"Did It In A Minute" Daryl Hall & John Oates - the arrangement is a little overcomplicated, but the hook is solid. Maybe their biggest hit which didn't make it onto the 1983 Rock N Soul Pt 1 which I listened to 1,000,000 times as a teenager.I heard this song for the first time when I took their LP Private Eyes (1981) out of the Topsfield Town Library. Yes kids, these things HAPPENED.
"If I Can't Change Your Mind" (Solo Mix) Sugar - This is one of my favorite songs of the 1990s, so when it was selected for the Onion A/V Club's Undercover series, I was excited. The A/V Club invites bands to visit their office a cover a song from a pre-selected list. Somehow, Bob Mould visited and covered his own Sugar song, then, the Decemberists visited and covered it too. Since I can't buy these songs on MP3, I've added the solo mix of "If I Can't Change Your Mind" to my mix-- the B-side which singer Colin Meloy cites as his favorite.
"I Might" Wilco, the first single from their upcoming album The Whole Love
"China Grove" [live at the Greek Theater 1982] The Doobie Brothers
"Paradise By The "C" [live at the Roxy] Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band

The Big Man 1942-2011

Guys Movie Night: Captain America

2011-07-29T15:18:00.002-04:00

A wholesome and workmanlike origin story for Captain America. Because I knew nothing about Captain America, I had pretty low expectations. Now I would call him "Wolverine, minus the claws, plus a lot of earnest patriotism." I joked beforehand that all I wanted to see was Captain America punching out Hitler. And I got that, but it turns out that Captain America doesn't fight any Nazis at all. In fact, no one fights any Nazis. From the very beginning, our villain, The Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) goes rogue and takes over Hiter's Crazy Science division for himself. Why is this movie set during World War II if there's no Nazis? Sure, the Red Skull wants to take over the world, but the only people we see him kill are other Nazis, and a couple of our faceless Army guys in a firefight.
It's hard to win my heart over when there's no faces to connect with. Red Skull has a red skull, and all of Red Skull's henchmen wear gimp masks, so the only face of the enemy is Toby Jones, the stubby scientist stuck between a madman and a laser gun, who we actually feel some sympathy for!

Chris Evans was just perfect as Steve Rogers. The shrimpy weakling Steve Rogers, before he gets his super-serum, was a seamless effect with Evans's head on a concave weakling (Not a body double. He was so small, maybe it should be body "three-quarters"?)

I really appreciated how Rogers' costume evolved. Getting superheroes into costumes is often the most clunky plot point in the movies. In this case, it's a nice organic evolution: he starts out onstage in a stage costume identical to the comic book look. When he slips away on his first mission behind enemy lines, he cobbles together some gear- an awesome combination of his stage costume and shield, plus a great leather jacket, and a blue army helmet stolen from one of the dancing girls. I wish he was dressed like this for the whole movie! Only later does he suit up with the leather helmet and round shield.

A thousand thanks to two award-winning character actors who save this movie from blandness: Stanley Tucci is the avuncular German ex-pat scientist who befriends Steve. He got a chuckle from the crowd with every line. Equally indispensible was Tommy Lee Jones as the Colonel shepherding the super-soldier project. He's playing his bread-and-butter authority figure, and he charms the audience all the way. I also loved veteran corset-wearer Hayley Atwell as the British agent who goes all moony for Rogers. She actually gets to shoot bad guys and punch d-bags first, so she's not useless like Rose Byrne's agent in X-Men: First Class. She tends to stand uncomfortably close to Steve in their dialog scenes, and she barely cries at the end. She also looks perfect in the period hair and makeup. That lipstick was a.maz.ing.

We had some technical quibbles with the movie: even if you grant that the super-serum is pure fantasy, I did not believe that they only had one dose on hand and had no notes or research written down to create more? What kind of defense contract is this? Adam noticed the motorcycle chase through the forest was a little too similar to the same scene in Return of the Jedi. Rogers even uses a tripwire to throw the bad guys off their bikes, Ewok style. Also, we found it odd that the Red Skull's underground base fortifications are angled the wrong way, like a ramp, so Captain America can jump over them like Evel Knievel. Everything else was completely plausible, or, at least, comic-book plausible.
I guess the reason I brand the movie "workmanlike" at the top of this review is my cynicism at work. This origin movie, which, like most origin movies, doesn't contain much action for the first 30-40 minutes, felt more like a necessary stepping stone for the Avengers mega-franchise than a story by itself.

I am also undrewhelmed by its director Joe Johnston. Johnston, a former George Lucas protege, was the art director for Star Wars Episodes 4-6, plus Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Battlestar Galactica TV pilot in 1978. Since Honey I Shrunk The Kids in 1989, he has directed eight more effects-heavy features, including Jumanji, Jurrasic Park III, and The Wolfman. He doesn't seem to direct with much character or personality. The most cynical part of me thinks he's the director you can count on to successfully accomplish your film's technical challenges. Kind of like Michael Bay with no personality and a smaller budget.

TRIVIA: Dorchester native Neal McDonough plays one of the Captain's team, with a bowler hat and muttonchops. I thought to myself "This getup is wayyy too specific. This must be a character from the comic books." Indeed, he's future Agent Of S.H.I.E.L.D "Dum Dum" Dugan.

TRIVIA: Before he heads to the front, Rogers performs in US Savings Bond fundraising shows, where he gets to knock out "Hitler" for the crowd each day. The guy playing the actor playing Hitler, James Payton, has another famous part with no dialog: the father of Neville Longbottom in Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix (we only see him in one of those magical moving photos.)

TRIVIA: Strangely, Joe Johnston has directed another comic book movie set during WWII where undercover Nazis are plotting to steal American technology in order to create super-soldiers: The Rocketeer. Compounding the strangeness, both movies feature wealthy industrial tycoons with awesome moustaches: Howard Hughes invented the rocket in The Rocketeer (Terry O'Quinn from Lost, right.) The real-life Hughes is the inspiration for the Howard Stark character (played by Dominic Cooper, left).

My grade: how about a B?
Regal Fenway Stadium 13 (screen 12) with: Adam, Angus, Geoff, Ilan, Jack, Jeff, John, Marc, and Marc's other friend whose name I never got :-S

Horrible Bosses

2011-07-24T11:28:00.020-04:00

A madcap, screwball comedy. Extremely rough around the edges, a messy third act, and some underbaked character development, but I was laughing out loud through the whole thing.

Charlie Day steals the movie from Jason Bateman and Jason Sudeikis. I've only seen a little of his TV show, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, but I guess I should check it out?
Of the three horrible bosses, I wish there had been more of Colin Farrell. I found him hilarious in In Bruges, and he's great here. He didn't need the ridiculous bald-cap, comb-over appliance on his head- that was just distracting.
The couple next to me, were completely silent all the way through. I think it was a bit racier than they expected? There was no sign of Rachel from Friends in Aniston's performance.
My grade: B-plus. Wait to watch it on demand, you'll be glad you did.
TRAILER NOTES: The trailer for Final Destination 5 starts with a woman getting zapped in the face by a Lasik machine. That was too gross to watch (I hid behind my hat), but the rest of the trailer was hi-LAR-ious. During a catastrophic bridge collapse, David Koechner (Champ Kind from Anchorman) is hanging on for dear life. Why would you cast Todd Packer from The Office in a horror movie? Anyway, there he is, hanging onto the edge of certain death, when a tanker truck full of... wait for it... boiling hot tar overturns all over him. Didn't they do that to Homer on The Simpsons once? I had to laugh out loud. (I am certain the couple next to me thought I was a sociopath.)
(Showcase Cinema Du Lux, Dedham)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

2011-07-16T14:48:00.004-04:00

The eight movie, ten year, billion-dollar saga stumbles across the finish line.
I didn't really appreciate how high my expectations were until I discovered how disappointed I was by the conclusion of our decade-long epic. The quality of Potter 3-6 had been so consistent that I didn't really consider the possibility of a misstep.

Perhaps those expectations weighed too heavily on the creators of this movie. Perhaps the temptations of 3-D can be faulted. Many times in the last decade, the Potter films have varied wildly from the source material, almost always for the better. For the first time, especially the second half of 7.2 (7.2.2?), the changes from page to screen seem arbitrary and lessen the impact of what should be the most powerful storytelling of the whole series.

Let's back up and appreciate the successes. The movie is surefooted right up until Harry is "killed" by Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest. The opening scenes at Shell Cottage are terrific. The conversation between Harry and Griphook the goblin was outstanding. Acting inside a full face mask is a thankless task, but who better than Warwick Davis to nail it. Davis has been playing Ewoks, leprechauns, dwarves, elves, and paranoid androids for over 25 years. The negotiation before the Gringotts break-in? My wife said "it was like a Guy Richie movie!"

Horcruxes: screenwriter Steve Kloves found an efficient workaround to the Horcrux hunting. Instead of lengthy detective work, Harry Potter, being a Horcrux himself, can sense the presence of other Horcruxes. This helps the movie immensely. Not only does this streamline the search-- when Harry's in a room with a Horcrux, he can sense it -- but it helps bolster the idea that he's a Horcrux himself. I didn't even notice until days later, that we never learn anything about the Hufflepuff Cup Horcrux which they steal from the Gringotts vault.

The Malfoys: Who would have thought that we would learn to pity the Malfoys so profoundly? Draco seals his reputation as a classic bully/coward in the Room of Requirement, when he flees at the first sign of a real threat. His parents, who care about their son before even Voldemort, take him and flee Hogwarts at the first opportunity.

Don't Cry For Me Severus: Speaking of reversals of allegiance, Alan Rickman sealed the deal and made us all cry as the ultimate hero, and martyr, of the series. Such a complex, conflicted, and in the end, emotionally honest character. Bravo. I was hopeful that Snape's backstory in the pensieve would be handled well, and I was not disappointed. I don't remember whether, in the book, Snape appears in Godric's Hollow and find his true love Lily Potter dead? It works amazingly well in the movie.

Letdowns and Arbitrary Changes

Ron and Hermione: I was surprised how much silently standing behind Harry they do in this movie. The much anticipated first kiss was only OK. Ron's head was in the way! Also, they had to rewrite the circumstances: in the book, Hermione kisses Ron in front of everyone, after Ron remembers that the house elves (Hermione's pet charity) need to be evacuated from Hogwarts. Thankfully, the whole house elf subplot was completely omitted from the movies. Instead, a scene which we don't see in the book -- Hermione destroying a Horcrux in the Chamber of Secrets -- is shown, and they kiss there, by themselves in front of a green screen, instead.

SIDE NOTE: Harry was in the Chamber of Secrets only 5 years earlier, but it feel like 100 years ago!

How the Mighty Have Fallen: They must have seen this coming, but it must have been disappointing for the actors playing the Dursleys to see their roles in the saga evaporate. (I didn't say *I* was disappointed!) It feels like Harry spent 45 minutes with the Dursleys in the Sorcerer's Stone, but 10 years later, Mrs. Dursley doesn't even get any lines! Her younger self does make an appearance in a flashback, though.

Snape's Death in the Boathouse? I don't even remember there ever being any boats on The Black Lake, never mind a Hogwarts boathouse. Snape's death scene has moved from the Shrieking Shack to the boathouse. I don't know why. I suspect it's so the director could show Snape's 'Death by Snake' without pushing the movie into rated R territory: Snape is attacked against a frosted glass wall. We see his gruesome death with Harry, Ron, Hermione, through the glass dimly. Otherwise, it might have been harder to show the intensity of the deadly snake attack without grossing us out too much. That's my theory, anyway.

The Kings Cross scene misses the whole point of the conversation. In the book, this is Harry's chance to finally lash out at Dumbledore for misleading and controlling Harry. Harry's trust in Dumbledore is shaken, and Dumbledore apologizes, and regrets all the poor choices of his youth. Instead, we get some meaningless platitudes from a soporific Dumbledore. It's like his lines were torn from a Deep Thoughts 365 calendar.

The blocking and logistics of the remainder of the plot are almost all different from the book. In the movie, Voldemort + the Death Eaters enter Hogwarts with Hagrid and the "dead" Potter. Voldemort taunts the good guys, but Neville, instead of killing Nagini, launches into a lengthy Hallmark-worthy, mortifyingly bad speech about how Harry isn't really dead if he lives in our hearts (I can't believe I am typing this). For some reason, Voldemort is struck dumb and does nothing while this goes on. This is the same Voldemort who, hours earlier, killed Pius Thicknesse only because Thicknesse spoke out of turn at the wrong moment. But when Longbottom shows up Voldemort with a ridiculous pro-Harry speech, he's suddenly turned lenient?

As Harry reveals he's not dead, the battle resumes, with Harry, Ron, and Hermione pursuing Nagini, then Harry and Voldemort battling each other alone, flying together from place to place in that black smoke-trail spell thingy. The pursuit with Nagini does give Ron and Hermione something to do besides battling generic Death Eaters, I guess. The cynic in me suspects the ridiculous curlicue rollercoaster ride was added to show off the 3D effects. They have to give the 3D audience's their money's worth...right?

Bellatrix Lestrange's death by duel with Mrs. Weasley is a very satisfying confrontation in the book. Mrs. Weasley even calls her a bitch! In the movie, Bellatrix turns into 1,000 pixels and explodes. This was totally ridiculous. Why are they fancying up her death with really cruddy effects? The emotional impact is completely neutralized.

What's most important is the ultimate duel between Harry and Voldy, and boy, did they mess it up. I remember reading this scene with my heart pounding. I often read too fast, scanning ahead, skipping detail in favor of action. In this case, it took all my will not to skip ahead. I focused on every word as the tension mounted, building, building...

In the movie, Harry and Voldy shoot their final spells at each other in slow-motion, until Voldy dissolves into ash in slow motion. No one witnesses this. All the dialog is ommitted.

It's almost as if the emotional payoff of their struggle is less important than the actual physical confrontation, which is the opposite point of the book. In the book, what was daring and surprising about the final "duel" between Harry and Voldy was that Harry basically disarmed Voldy with his point-by-point dismissal of all of Voldy's assumptions. By the time they actually cast their opposing, trademark spells, Harry had already proven, QED, that Harry had won. The death of Voldy was only a capper, not the actual proof.
Why does Voldy have to dissolve into ash in slow motion? Why can't he just fall to the ground, dead? More 3D effects in place of genuine emotion. I haven't seen this much show-off "look at the magic we can do" since the first movie.

The Coda: They couldn't leave it out, but the "19 Years Later" coda was too distracting to work. All I was thinking about is "how well did they make these 20 year olds look 40?" I still got misty when Harry describes Snape as "the bravest man I ever knew".

So, a bit of a stumble to the end, like a Olympic sprinter who crosses the finish line while losing their balance and falling on their head. The tone was all over the place in the last half of the movie, and most of the conclusion had no dialog at all. The way I figure it, they'll begin to remake these movies in 2025, which means the next actor to play Harry Potter will be born any day now...

My grade: B-minus

TRAILER NOTE: The teaser trailer for next summer's Dark Knight Rises was incomprehensible. Commissioner Gordon is in a hospital bed, mumbling through an oxygen mask to an offscreen Batman. I only caught every other word. I am not more excited to see #3 than I was already... which isn't much.

AUDIENCE NOTE: We were almost entertained by an epic showcase of douchebaggery on display next to us. As the movie is beginning (Voldemort stealing the Elder Wand from Dumbledore's crypt), a couple arrives in our row of seats. Next to me is an empty seat, two ladies, and another empty seat. This newly-arrived woman asks if my adjacent seat is free. I say yes. Then the woman's date asks the two ladies if they could move down to create a pair of free seats. Since the movie is already playing, and there are other pairs of seats free, the ladies were justified in saying no. Then the DB boyfriend starts to complain to them about it, while the woman would rather just sit separately than cause a scene. This is when the shushing begins in earnest. My policy is, no shushing until the action actually begins onscreen. Since this scene was a repeat from the end of the last movie, and the title of the film hadn't come up yet, I bit my tongue. The guy continued to grumble, and the shushing became more insistent. Thankfully, this foursome were silent through the movie, until we were all exiting through the lobby, and the guy restarted his unapologetic complaining about the ladies refusing to move over. Seeing such a pure douchebag in public is like spotting an albino squirrel: so rare, we must appreciate the wondrous diversity of Mother Nature. (Embassy Theater #5, Waltham)

Harry Potter Reviews 2001-2011

2011-07-11T11:17:00.005-04:00

The wife and I just re-watched Deathly Hallows Part 1 (we just say Potter 7.1) on demand, to refresh our memories: Gran's babysitting the boy as we go on another movie date. Our third movie in two weeks! After 10 years, the eight-movie, billion dollar Potter series is about to wrap up. Here's a look back at my reviews.

Sorcerer's Stone Straight C.
I did not see Chamber Of Secrets in the theater. I saw it most recently on ABC family in 2010: it's better than Sorcerer's Stone. C-plus.
Prisoner of Azkaban Straight A!
Goblet of Fire B-plus
Order of the Phoenix B-plus
Half-Blood Prince Straight A!
Deathly Hallows Part 1 Straight A!
Deathly Hallows Part 2 B-minus.

(I predict they'll remake all the movies starting in 2025.)

L-R: Harry, The Weasley twins, Mundungus, Fleur, Ron, and Hermione.

Two Movies, One Weekend

2011-07-06T13:48:00.001-04:00

The wife and I saw movies in two days this weekend! And joy of joys, I'm giving them both A grades. For all of you scoring at home, we haven't pulled off two flicks in two days since Juno and Michael Clayton in January 2008. I was surprised to learn while browsing this blog that we've seen at least two movies in two days (not counting double or triple features) on a dozen occasions over the last eight years.

Super 8

2011-07-03T14:40:00.026-04:00

J.J. Abrams has crafted the ultimate summer movie: a pulse-pounding teenage adventure, a coming-of-age romance, and monster-in-the-bushes fright all at once. Super 8 is a clever blend of Close Encounters, Stand By Me, E.T., The X-Files, The Goonies, Jurassic Park, and The Sandlot. It may sound contradictory to thank Abrams for making a great summer movie with an original screenplay, and point out the seven movies I'm reminded of at the same time? In a year featuring FOUR superhero origin movies (Thor, X-Men Babies, Green Lantern, and Captain America), an homage is a breath of fresh air.

Five noisy teenage boys are filming their own homemade zombie movie, when a USAF train derails in their laps, unleashing an alien cargo into their cozy Ohio 1979 town. Soon some crazy shit starts happening all over town; our teenage protagonist Joe (Joel Courtney) starts poking around, while his dad, a sheriff's deputy (Kyle Chandler) starts asking questions too.

Joe is the heart and soul of the group. He digs into the mystery of the train crash while the Air Force sloppily covers it up. Meanwhile, he falls in love with his gang's newly-cast ingenue, Alice (Elle Fanning), while he is struggling to mourn the loss of his mom a few months earlier.

The nostalgia for the late 1970s is thick on the ground. Writer/director Abrams turned 13 in the summer of '79, and his love for his adolescent era shows. I'm only 6 years younger than Abrams, so I could appreciate the attention to detail. (My collection of vintage car and truck toys from that era is a testament to my appreciation.) I was never distracted by the costumes. Too many period movies can distract you by trying to set the scene with period-specific clothes, but the costumes in this movie were subtle and non-distracting. (The only detail that felt jarring is a brief Rubik's Cube reference- I think of the Cube as a 1980s item, and indeed, I looked it up, it was not sold in the US until a year after the movie is set.) The time period also frames the homage to the movies of that era, especially those of his producer, Steven Spielberg.

The Spielberg comparisons are unavoidable, but I am thrilled to report, that unlike every Spielberg movie I can think of, the father figure is not absent from the children's lives. It's the mother who dies the day before the movie begins, making for some tear-jerking, especially at the end of the movie. I really appreciated all the family relationships in the movie- Kyle Chandler's fumbling, non-parental relationship with his son; Joe's friend Charles (the zombie movie auteur and Spielberg/Abrams stand-in) and his sprawling family zoo, complete with parental power struggles and sibling diplomacy; and Alice's strained bond with her emotionally ravaged, alcoholic dad (Ron Eldard).

The teenage adventures are fun. The teens all talk at once, all the time (this reminded me of The Goonies and The Sandlot), they behave just like teenagers are supposed to react under stress- they scream, cry, vomit, and barely escape with their lives. There's a lot of children in peril, so I wouldn't recommend it for pre-teens. The monster scares are truly scary, even if the monster is a little too similar to the Cloverfield monster.

The photography is great, although Abrams is still over-using his "intentional lens flare" trademark. I loved the music, and wouldn't ya know it, it's my favorite Oscar-winning composer, Michael Giacchino! (The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Up, Star Trek) The rock and roll music is also great- music supervisor George Drakoulias must have hacked my iPod for ELO, The Knack, The Cars, and Blondie.

I have to give this an A grade. I would see it again for sure.

At the Somerville Theater with my wife.

Midnight In Paris

2011-07-02T14:38:00.003-04:00

A whimsical history ride. Gil (Owen Wilson) is a Hollywood screenwriting hack, restless over the cultural bankruptcy of the 21st century, longing for a golden era. On vacation in Paris with his superficial fiancee and her boring parents, he escapes into the 1920s one night as the clock strikes 12, and becomes immersed in the "Moveable Feast" of Paris between the wars. I'm giving this an A-minus grade. (It's not a straight "A" only due to the complete shamelessness that Allen writes the same old arguments between the protagonist and his fiancee. When Gil calls a rival a "pseudo-intellectual", I felt like I'd heard this argument 100 times before.)


You've entered the 1920s. It's just sinking in.

Owen Wilson is just right as the Woody stand-in. I didn't really believe the standard hypochondriac jokes coming from his mouth, but the rest of the Woody template felt genuine. His reactions as he discovers he's traveled in time are spot-on perfect. Poor Rachel McAdams, saddled with the thankless fiancee/shallow shrew role. You can't say no to a Woody Allen movie, but she doesn't have much to do here except wear amazing clothing, and get paid to sightsee in Paris for a month.

You have to know the basics of 1920s culture to have fun in this movie- I know just barely enough to get the jokes and laugh in the right places.

The casting of the real-life people was terrific, especially Alison Pill (Scott Pilgrim vs The World) as Zelda Fitzgerald; Corey Stoll (and his impressive moustache) as Hemingway; and...well, there's two Oscar winners in cameo roles, but I don't want to spoil it for you!

I wasn't too impressed with Marion Cotillard as the artistic muse ingenue. We can all agree she's enchanting, but there wasn't much more there except gazing at her face.

Landmark Embassy Theater, Waltham, MA, with my wife on our fifth wedding anniversary.

Kurt Fuller is now in my personal "Hey It's That Guy" Hall of Fame- he plays McAdams's father, the "Alan Alda" role (only Fuller is 20 years younger). Fuller made his debut on Knight Rider in 1984, and has appeared on every TV show ever since. I just saw him in the News Radio pilot; on the big screen, I saw him in Ghostbusters II, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wayne's World...155 IMDb credits total. It's appropriate that he's in a time-travelling movie- he was in the Jean-Claude Van Damme TIMECOP movie, and the TV spinoff too.

Top Ten Tom Hanks Movies

2011-07-01T21:50:00.004-04:00

With Tom Hanks's Larry Crowne in theaters now-- I'm guessing that'll be the best movie I watch on demand this fall-- Boston.com hosted a "rank your favorite Tom Hanks movies" page. My list is below. I guess my criteria is "movies I like to see more than once" which eliminates Philadelphia. At the last second I replaced Apollo 13 with The Da Vinci Code on this list. Both are great fun, both are Ron Howard movies, but Apollo 13 is serious and respectable, while Da Vinci Code is ridiculous fantasy. I literally did not understand the plot of "The Leonardo Code" (as it should be called), and, at the time, I was disappointed with the movie, but it's been growing on me when I catch it on cable tv.

In alphabetical order; click on the links to read my Stub Hubby reviews:

Big (I definitely saw this in the theater)
The 'Burbs (my wife introduced me to this movie circa 2004.)
The Da Vinci Code
Forrest Gump
Joe Versus The Volcano (the first half is wonderful; it loses steam once he sets off on the sailboat.)
A League of Their Own (fast forward through the worthless present-day framing device)
The Money Pit (see photo, above; my favorite Hanks movie which no one else seems to remember)
Saving Private Ryan
Sleepless in Seattle
That Thing You Do!

X-Men: First Class

2011-06-16T15:18:00.003-04:00

A enjoyable superhero movie, stylishly set in the early 1960s, and spearheaded by hunky romantics Michael Fassbender and James McEvoy.

The story of how young Magneto and Xavier met and evolved into heroic X-Men is a powerful, romantic, emotional journey. Clever casting James McEvoy and Michael Fassbender: both proven leads in a series of female-centric romance movies (Becoming Jane, Atonement, Jane Eyre), they were a slam-dunk hit with the ladies.

I don't look like a penis, do I?

The genesis of their friendship makes a great story, and it's well told here. The best origin stories show the flaws alongside the strengths which make the characters great. Charles Xavier is patronizing and smug, but also an idealist and natural leader. Magneto is headstrong and irrational, but also charismatic and emotional.

The plot -- a global-political chess match against a Bond-style supervillain-mutant --is a strong classic James Bond style thriller. The 1960s setting offered lots of opportunities for slick Mad Men style. Kevin Bacon is good but not great as the megalomaniac who wants to trigger World War III in order to rid the world of non-mutants. I laughed out loud when his secret submarine is launched! Very old-school! All-white interior, oil paintings, wet bar, and a crew of two? That's some automation he has there.

The climactic battle scenes between the X-Men and the rival navies of the USA and USSR is terrific summer movie fare. I love watching ships getting blown up, the X-Jet swooping about, and giant holes punched in submarines. I love it when the sound is so loud I can hoot with contentment and no one else cares.

The "Muppet Babies" characters -- the "First Class" of the title - disappoint me. Except for Professor X, Magneto, Mystique, and Beast, none of the mutants featured in the first four movies are reintroduced here. They've dug up new-to-the-movies mutants, which frankly, if they were more interesting, they would have made it into a movie by now. If this is the first movie in a new series, does that mean we're stuck with these young mutants? They don't have to have awesome powers to be interesting, but these feel like the bottom of the barrel:

Laser shoots from his chest
Super-screaming ability
Conjures windstorms? How is this guy different from Storm (Halle Berry)?
Dragonfly who shoots flaming spitballs
Devil who can teleport (like Nightcrawler [Alan Cumming])

...and then there's Emma Frost. Frost can read minds like Xavier, turns into a diamond, which is pretty, I guess, and has super-non-acting powers. January Jones cannot act even a little bit. She spends the whole movie in her 1960s underwear, or in skintight white leather -- but it's not easy to find any sex appeal when she stares straight ahead blankly All. The. Time. The mannequins at Old Navy are sexier than this.

This is her intense look... and all her other looks too.

She looks especially bad next to Jennifer Lawrence. She's the blue shape-shifting Mystique -- played by Rebecca Romijn in X Men 1,2,3. She spends most of the movie in her human (non-blue) disguise, and she's all earthy sexuality and roiling emotions. Too bad her emotional journey out of the mutant closet has been told already by other mutants in previous movies.

Also a letdown is Rose Byrne's CIA agent. She discovers the mutants involved in this evil plot, and becomes a liason between the X Men and the government, but when the crisis reached the breaking point, she was as spineless as a boiled dandelion. I would have preferred her ruthless character from Bridesmaids over this one.

The triangle between Magneto, Xavier, and Mystique was richly emotional and strong, which is a fine portent for the future of this reboot. Too bad the rest of the mutants don't have much to offer.

NOTES: Great to see James Remar (48 Hrs, Pineapple Express) and Michael Ironside (Top Gun, Total Recall) as an Army general and Navy captain. Was Kurtwood Smith already booked?

With Marc and Adam at Loews Boston Common, digital projection.

Previously reviewed on Stub Hubby:

Great Origin Stories:

Casino Royale (2006)
Batman Begins (2005)
The first 10 minutes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

Bridesmaids

2011-06-03T11:07:00.089-04:00

A funny, thoughtful, and real movie about women and the way they behave on Planet Earth- with some great vomit and diarrhea jokes too.
Based on the commercials, I was expecting a romp. There is some nutty physical comedy, including some acrobatic sex, emergency bowel evacuations, a passive-aggressive tennis match (music by AC/DC), and of course, topless driving. I am not making this up. However, the movie is NOT "the female Hangover" like the marketing weasels desperately hoped you'd think. I would compare it more closely to The 40 Year-Old Virgin; a hard-R crass comedy which also tries to be honest about contemporary relationships too.

I am not a "drunk the Kool-Aid" Kristen Wiig fanatic; I think her manic characters on SNL are mostly just manic. However, she shows all sorts of layers and subtlety here; she cowrote the movie, which helps. After her Act 3 meltdown, she drives home, about to hit rock bottom, and all she does is stare off into the distance and say "Shit." A very nice and real moment! Soon after she bottoms out at work, where she gets into a sparring match with a truculent teenage customer; she actually goes for the nuclear option and calls her a see-you-next-Tuesday! BOOM!

Two newcomers stole all their scenes. Chris O'Dowd is the love interest, or, as my wife called him, "the Irish Seth Rogen!" he indeed has that modest charm and goofy demeanor which Rogen has made castable. He's so non-Hollywood, with a big friendly face, that you can't stop looking at him, especially when Wiig's other boyfriend is Jon Hamm, the most straight Hollywood face ever.
Meanwhile, Melissa McCarthy pins her scenes to the carpet and slaps them around. She plays the woman with no pretensions, incapable of bullshit. I can't wait to see what's next for her!

My grade: Solid A! My only complaint- Jill Clayburgh (as Wiig's mom) has the exact same hair color treatment as Wiig. It's like they decided to ensure they looked related by using the same color and highlights on them both. When they hug, their hair seems to meld together!

Upstairs at the Somerville Theater, with George D. The theater was 90% full, and 80% of that was ladies. I think George said "I think we're the only pair of guys here." Before the show, the woman next to me said "Do you mind if I ask a rude question?" I was ready to be asked "Did you fart just now?" but instead, she asked "Have you heard if The Hangover 2 is any good?" by which she meant "Why did you and your guy friend come see this instead of Hangover 2?" I explained that our wives had seen Bridesmaids last week and recommended it to us. They thought this was charming. I explained that I loved The Hangover 1 (I saw it downstairs on the big screen two years earlier, I even dressed as Zach/Alan for our Oscars party), but Bridesmaids had been very strongly recommended. I tried not to say "I assume Hangover 2 sucks", because, honestly, I have enough opinions I want to share about movies I have seen, no need to waste people's time on opinions of movies I have not seen.

132 DJ Zoomba

2011-05-26T11:13:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite apps on my Android phone is SoundHound- the app listens to music and identifies it for you. Just press one button, hold the phone up to the speaker, and presto! This is super-handy for identifying songs from the radio, incidental music from TV and movies, and in public spaces. Once it IDs the song, I simply press "bookmark", then I can go back later and buy the songs wherever I want. Unlimited uses are free, so perhaps I overuse it, but the novelty has not worn off yet.

"Breaking The Girl" Anna Nalick sings that song "Breathe (3AM)" which I included in my last mix. I found her cover of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' song while buying the "Breathe" song on Amazon.
"Tree By The River" Iron & Wine
"Clocks" An amazing salsa-ification of the Coldplay recording by something called 'Rhythms Del Mundo'. It's not a cover- more like a remix.
"Quattro (World Drifts In)" Calexico, from their album Feast Of Wire.
"Untitled" [live] Shockra: One of the coolest experiences of my Emerson College experience was working at WERS. One of the cool experiences of that cool experience is my three-year association with the world-funk-jazz combo Shockra. I was a host and manager of the world music show Gyroscope, and Shockra became our favorite band. We played their music every day, mostly from promo cassettes, we saw them live a dozen times across town, and they came to the studio to perform live in the studio regularly. In 1993 we released a live CD, which included this epic 10 minute track, maybe Shockra's most ambitious song. I was thrilled to be sitting in the studio for the recording, as the host of that day's live music. After their encore, the crowd in the control room went apoplectic; at the end of the CD you can hear (21-year-old) me "out-troduce" the song, then open the control room door to let in the applause.
"Let The Light In" I don't know anything about Bob Schneider, but I heard this song on the radio, and it has a nice thumb-piano part.
"Sound And Vision" from David Bowie's Low (1977). Fun fact: David Bowie's lead vocal does not begin until exactly halfway through this three-minute song.
"Burning Down The House" this live performance, from Stop Making Sense, is far superior to Talking Heads' studio recording.
"One Thing Leads to Another" The Fixx
"On Melancholy Hill" Gorillaz
"Les Yeux De Ton Pere" Fun story here: I used to play this Franco-Clash song ("Eyes of Your Father") from Les Negresses Vertes, regularly on WERS Gyroscope in the early 1990s. Fast forward to the MP3 era, the LP is out of print and the song is not available for 99c download. The song was also included in the movie French Kiss, and its soundtrack CD. I wasn't about to pay $17 for one song, but so I have kept my eye out for it--- until May 2011, when I finally found the French Kiss CD at a church tag sale. Persistence pays off!
"You, Now" I heard this Greg Laswell song on the "Adult Alternative" channel on my cable TV.
"Mandolin Rain" This recent live performance from Bruce Hornsby & The Noisemakers is a little too "jazzy" for me. I don't know if he has discarded most of the melodic hooks for artistic reasons, or because he's too old to hit the notes anymore, but it's not the same melody anymore.
"Sweet Love" Anita Baker
"Come and Find Me" Josh Ritter: As heard on the ABC-TV show Castle!
"To Kingdom Come" Passion Pit
"Jane Says" Jane's Addiction
"Time To Pretend" MGMT

Let There Be Light

2011-05-23T13:31:00.002-04:00

Ty Burr sheds light on too-dark digital movie screenings

“I walked into the room and I could barely see, and my stomach dropped...The first screening looked spectacular and the second was so dark, it was daytime versus nighttime. If they’re doing this for a big screening, I can’t imagine what they do for regular customers. That’s no way to see a movie." --Bobby Farrelly

If you haven't read Ty Burr's exposé from Page 1 of the Sunday Globe, read that first and prepared to be appalled.

I am appalled, but not surprised. As my wife says, its like escaped monkeys are running the theaters. It takes a lot of guts to fleece customers for $10 (or more) for 2D, and $15 for 3D, and then screw them again with a subpar exhibition. Digital projection is supposed to be the golden age of moviegoing- no more scratchy or blurry prints, perfect digital sound! A few years ago the exhibitors were squawking about how expensive it would be to refit all their screens to digital. Well, they fixed that problem! Sign a contract and accept free projectors from Sony! But wait, the Sony projectors can't easily be switched from 3D to 2D. Ty Burr's Page 1 article might exert some pressure on the theaters, but I am also not surprised that paying customers aren't noticing. And even if they notice, no one wants to ruin a night out by complaining to a powerless drone at the customer service desk who won't pass your complaint along anyway.

I can't say for sure that I have witnessed this witlessness firsthand, and that's ironically due to the price of 3D movies. I prefer to see the 2D version of a movie, and since AMC and Regal don't offer that option anymore, I end up at The Somerville Theater, where the 2D is only $8, and you can drink beer. No contest! Over the last 18 months, I have only been to Showcase, AMC, and Regal Cinemas for 2D screenings eight times. One of those was Harry Potter 7.1, but that was in the Showcase Cinema Du Lux Level, where they leave the lights on at 20% so people can see their food, so the screening was ruined anyway. Another was The Book of Eli, at Regal Fenway's Screen 2, which was not likely a 3D projector in January 2010.

What's my takeaway? Steer clear of AMC and Regal, and hope this 3D fad blows over.

SIDE NOTE: the Boston.com website is so badly organized. The article, which was featured on Page 1 of the Sunday Globe, is not featured on the Boston.com movies page: there IS a link to it in the bottommost secion of the page, in a list of links "More from the Globe". Wouldn't a Page 1 story about moviegoing merit top billing on the Movies home page? The article is not included in the Boston.com Movie Nation blog where all of Ty Burr and Wesley Morris' other posts go, and it's not in the Culture Desk blog either. Is there any human being involved with this website?

At first I thought they had deleted the helpful infographic which accompanied the article in the paper. When my Dad emailed a link to the article online, the graphic is missing. It turns out the article is presented on Boston.com in two different places: the link my Dad sent me is from articles.boston.com; the link at the bottom of the Boston.com Movies page is from www.boston.com, and it includes the infographic.

I know that the Globe is transforming their entire web site to a half-paywall model like their parent New York Times. Perhaps they're not spending any time on the current site because it's getting torn down anyway? Why paint the walls on a building if it's being demolished in 6 months, right? Well, who's going to want to pay for a new Boston.com if the free Boston.com was so disappointing?

(Some Titles Are) Parenthetical

2011-05-23T12:17:00.000-04:00

The parenthetical song title is a unique phenomenon to music. Why do song titles have parens? This morning, I read a post on theawl.com with a list of 169 parenthetical song titles. Each title fits into a type:

The title is too short/not descriptive, so they add more words "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)"
The title is too long, so they chop it off "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)"
The record label worries that people won't recognize the song they heard on the radio because the title is not the chorus. Sometimes these parens only appear on the 45, not the LP:

"Pride (In The Name of Love)"
"Brass In Pocket (I'm Special)"
"Train In Vain (Stand By Me)"

Beck just being weird "Truckdrivin’ Neighbors Downstairs (Yellow Sweat)"
REM just being weird "Auctioneer (Another Engine)"
Movie Theme Songs (Theme From "This Blog")
Silly jokes "She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft)"
Completely arbitrary "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)"

I have selected 75 parenthetical song titles, and severed the main title from the paren part. Print out this page, and try and match them back up again. Remember, some parens go in front, some at the end. Good luck! (Answers here).

December 1963	(500 Miles)
4th of July, Asbury Park	(All Night)
A Natural Woman	(And I Feel Fine)
Against All Odds	(And That's the Truth)
All Night Long	(Anthony's Song)
Bang A Gong	(Are Made of This)
Chelsea	(But I Like It)
Da Doo Ron Ron	(But I Won't Do That)
Died In Your Arms	(Come Out Tonight)
Don’t Forget Me	(Coming Home)
Don't Go Away Mad	(Don’t Go Back To)
Don't Know What You Got	(Don't Fear)
Don't You	(Enjoy What You Do)
Dude	(Everything I Do)
Earth Angel	(For Me)
Escape	(For My Love)
Exhale	(Forget About Me)
Falling in Love	(Get It On)
Fascination	(Gonna Be Alright)
Fight For Your Right	(I Can’t Get No)
Good Riddance	(I Don’t Want to Go to)
Happy Xmas	(I Feel Good)
He Hit Me	(I Just)
Higher and Higher	(I Like It)
I Believe	(I Think It's Going To Be A Long Long Time)
I Can't Go for That	(I'm Only Bleeding)
I Do It For You	(I'm Sorry)
I Got You	(Is Hard on the Knees)
I Knew You Were Waiting	(It Felt Like A Kiss)
I Never Loved a Man	(It's in His Kiss)
I Ran	(I've Been)
I Wanna Dance with Somebody	(I've Had)
I’m Gonna Be	(Just Go Away)
I'd Do Anything for Love	(Just Like)
I'd Lie for You	(Keep Feeling)
In Hammersmith Palais	(Let Me Be Your)
Instant Karma	(Looks Like a Lady)
Istanbul	(Man in Motion)
It’s The End of the World As We Know It	(Naive Melody)
It's Alright, Ma	(Nine to Five)
It's Only Rock 'n' Roll	(No Can Do)
Jump	(Not Constantinople)
Major Tom	(Not to Come)
Mama Told Me	(Oh, What A Night)
Money	(Pretty Young Thing)
Morning Train	(Put a Ring On It)
Movin' Out	(Sandy)
Norwegian Wood	(Say So Much)
P.Y.T .	(Shoop Shoop)
Peace, Love and Understanding	(Sittin' On)
Red Shoes	(So Far Away)
Rocket Man	(Take a Look at Me Now)
Rockville	(That's What I Want)
Rosalita	(The Angels Wanna Wear My)
Sad Songs	(The Final Acclaim)
Satisfaction	(The Piña Colada Song)
Searchin' So Long	(The Right Stuff)
Separate Ways	(The Way I Love You)
Single Ladies	(This Bird Has Flown)
So. Central Rain	(Till It's Gone)
St. Elmo’s Fire	(Time of Your Life)
Starting Over	(to Everything There Is a Season)
Sweet Dreams	(War Is Over)
Teddy Bear	(We All Shine On)
That's the Way	(What’s So Funny ‘Bout)
The Dock Of The Bay	(When He Walked Me Home)
The Reaper	(When I Fall in Love it Will Be Forever)
The Shoop Shoop Song	(When I’m Gone)
The Time of My LIfe	(White Man)
This Must Be the Place	(Who Loves Me)
Tonight's the Night	(Will You Be Mine)
Turn! Turn! Turn!	(Worlds Apart)
Wham Rap!	(You Gotta)...(To Party!)
You Got It	(You Make Me Feel Like)
You're in My Heart	(Your Love Has Lifted Me)

Andy Warhol

2011-05-11T13:53:00.000-04:00

What do Hank Azaria, David Bowie, Crispin Glover,and Guy Pearce have in common? They all have played Andy Warhol in the movies or on TV. Let's add Bill Hader to the list: click here to see him in full costume and makeup as Warhol for the new Men In Black III. Perhaps Warhol is such an abstract icon of popular culture, that anyone can play him, to suit the needs of the director? I bet Warhol would appreciate that. This is a guy who appeared as himself on The Love Boat in 1985!

131 Spring Forward

2011-03-21T15:35:00.000-04:00

"Got To Give It Up, Part 1" Marvin Gaye: From the campfire scene in Paul.
"Fun, Fun, Fun" Pharrell; From the movie Despicable Me.
"Old Days" Chicago
"Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five" Paul McCartney & Wings: Special version from the film One Hand Clapping, the first half showcases Paul's soulful solo vocal and piano, which then is spliced into the full final arrangement.
"Lasso" Phoenix
"Velcro Fly" ZZ Top has the same drum part as the "Lasso".
"F.M." Steely Dan
"Seven Chinese Brothers" R.E.M.
"I'm A Loser" The Beatles
"Victoria" I just saw The Old 97's play "Victoria" at a free show at SXSW.
"It's Bad You Know" R.L. Burnside
"Freeway" Aimee Mann
"Morning Moon" I am not saying I am going to become a superfan, but when I heard this song on the radio, I thought to myself "this is terrific! where has The Tragically Hip been all my life?"
"Dreams" Fleetwood Mac
"All Over The World" Electric Light Orchestra: the closing credits song from Paul, previously in the movie Xanadu.
"Loving You Is Easy" Sarah McLachlan: a pleasingly ordinary 4/4 chugging piano riff from Ms McLachlan.
"All My Nights I've Been Waiting [Liz Lemon's Theme] Tina Fey & Christopher Cross: what started as a gentle Christopher Cross joke on 30 Rock crossed over to reality when Mr Cross recorded an actual song based on the joke. When Worlds Collide!
"See The Lights" Simple Minds
"Breathe (2AM)" I learned Anna Nalick's name after holding my Android phone up to the radio and activating the SoundHound app.
"Good Is Good" Cool George Harrison-y guitar riff. From Sheryl Crow's Lance Armstrong period. Isn't it retroactively embarrassing to dedicate an LP to him?

Paul

2011-03-19T16:32:00.083-04:00

Paul's a terrible name for this movie. Perhaps the idea is to emphasize the central irony of the character: this crash-landed alien has gone native as an average American? How about E.T. Part 2: Fugitive Stoner From Mars? Nick Frost and Simon Pegg's latest combines Richard Dreyfuss' mad Midwest road trip from Close Encounters (remember that sad station wagon he rented?) with Midnight Run-style fugitive antics. There's a good balance of action and comedy, great locations, a house blows up in an exciting and genuine fashion, plus there's a terrific-looking CGI alien named Paul.

Frost and Pegg are comic book fanboys/BFFs who treat themselves to a RV road trip among the UFO hotspots of the American Southwest. When a four foot green alien nicknamed Paul emerges from the wreckage of a black Ford Crown Vic, their long-imagined first contact doesn't go the way they dreamed their whole lives. One of the jokes is that Paul's a better adjusted Earthling than the Earthlings are. What if E.T. were captured by the Men In Black, and grew up into a no bullshit, easy-going kinda buddy in cargo shorts and Birks?... except he has healing powers (like E.T. or the empath on Star Trek) and he can go invisible (like Predator.)

The Men In Black aren't going to let Paul get away: Jason Bateman is terrific as the only competent fed. He takes his usual wound-too-tight routine, then replaces the sardonic wit with a deadly seriousness. Michael Bluth never held his gun to GOB's head, but this guy does.

Kristen Wiig is solid as a sheltered trailer parker, brainwashed by her father's nutty fundamentalist beliefs, who has a secular revelation, then drinks deep from the cup of regularness: her attempts at swearing are earnest and hilarious, and the (thankfully brief) marijuana scene is funny, and short.
There are a couple of jaw-dropping cameos, and plenty of direct references to E.T., Close Encounters, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. At 104 minutes, it felt a little choppy, as if there's 10 minutes of character development left on the cutting room floor. I enjoyed it while knowing Frost and Pegg from all their other collaborations, but would a newbie be able to appreciate their characters without that foundation? What about Paul? I could feel more background stories about him lingering around the edges of the movie. I eagerly await the deleted scenes on the DVD. My wife puts this spottiness directly at the feet of director Greg Mottola (Adventureland, Superbad) whose career has underwhelmed us so far. If this had been directed by Frost/Pegg collaborator Edgar Wright, all the valuable character development would have been presented in a few efficient little scenes. No such luck here.
Sorry to end on a down note- it was actually a fun ride. B-plus!

P.S.: According to Google Maps, the drive from Area 51 to Moorcroft Wyoming is over 950 miles.

At the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Austin (South Lamar Blvd) -- read my review of the Alamo Drafthouse.

Theater Review: The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

2011-03-19T13:53:00.003-04:00

Combining dinner and a movie is tough to do well. How do you offer table service without disturbing the movie experience? How do you eat without getting ketchup on your shirt? How do you enjoy a meal which you literally never see 'cause it's so dark? I have been to three or four different eat-in movie theaters over the last fifteen years. The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema has perfected it. The Alamo Drafthouse combines an ideal chew 'n view experience, with specialty events, and blockbuster movies. Texans don't know how lucky they are. In Boston, you have to choose from these three, never all at once.
The Theater Itself
The actual design of the theater is a huge factor. The Alamo has stadium seating, with a continuous "bar" in front of all the seats. Between rows, there's a mini aisle for the servers to deliver food. They can come and go during the film and not obscure anyone's view. This is the only chew 'n view theater I've seen which has figured this out. The Keystone in Portland had a flat floor, with repurposed Lincoln Town Car seats on casters. The screen was mounted pretty high on the wall, which helps, but this is clearly the cheaper choice when building the facility.

Eating in the Dark
Humans were not meant to eat a juicy bacon cheeseburger in complete darkness, while reclining- at least not without a bib.The Alamo's seating is upright enough, and the bar is close enough, to minimize the drip factor. Also, there's very dim lighting on the bar only- not enough to distract from the movie. The Cinema Du Lux in Dedham's ceiling-mounted lighting is glowing at 20% all the way through the movie, effectively illuminating all your fellow moviegoers, basically distracting everyone the whole time.
Waitstaff
At the Alamo, you fill out a paper form with your food and beer order. During the pre-show, the wait staff will actually interact with you. During the movie, all you have to do is clip the order slip upright, and this flags your waiter. This worked perfectly for us. At the Keystone, the waiters used electric ordering minicomputers- I think they were supposed to make the service more effecient, but our service was slow. At the Cinema Du Lux, you have to speak to the waiter, so anyone who orders during the movie annoys everyone else. At the Framingham Premium Cinema, there's no "table" service during the movie.

The Charm Factor
The Alamo goes to the trouble to screen pre-show entertainment. Our feature film, Paul, stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. The pre-show included a selection of their pre-Hollywood sketch comedy from British TV, plus scenes from their previous films. Some care and effort went into this, care and effort which I think pays off.
Special Events
Singalongs, Snark-Alongs, Special food events- check out their website for all the movie loving details.
UPDATE: The story of a texting customer who was ejected- and the idiotic rant she left on the Alamo's answering machine. Thank you Drafthouse, for defending the quiet customers from the D-bags!

The Adjustment Bureau

2011-03-12T16:00:00.043-05:00

A thoughtful, rental-worthy thriller, slightly elevated by the palpable chemistry of Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. It's an existential look at chance vs. fate, destiny vs. free will, kind of like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, minus the whimsy, then add a Twilight Zone vibe. Maybe it's all the trilby hats which give it that classic 1950s New York/Mad Men feel.

Adam and I were left with a mild case of paranoia. As we walked and talked afterwards, every fleeting coincidence felt like a hidden scheme. Who was that man wearing the same coat as me? Why did the bartender choose the alias "Bridget"? Why were we both thinking the name "Brian" at the same moment? Which way do we turn the doorknob? How many pints fit into that glass boot anyway? We may never know. My Grade: B-plus. (Somerville Theatre)

Oscars Telecast Recap

2011-02-28T10:27:00.005-05:00

The Oscars show was disjointed, old-fashioned, atonal, but, at least it wasn't as long as it used to be! Regardless of who actually won, I give the show a D-plus. Here's the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good

The opening Inception parody was OK, especially when they rode into True Grit on horseback, and James Franco tells Jeff Bridges "I loved you in TRON."

Anne Hathaway during the opening monologue: "This was a great year for... lesbians! In general, and in the movies!"

Ninety-four-year-old Kirk Douglas, literally the oldest award presenter they could find, was charming, spontaneous and genuine, even if his earlobes terrify me. I loved his comment "I was nominated three times and never won!" Movie stars never change.

Melissa Leo dropping the F-bomb "...two years ago Kate (Winslet's speech) made it look so f---ing easy." BOOM!

Boys? Table 6 is waiting for their hot wings!

I think some of the winners were as excited to meet the presenters (Kirk Douglas, Oprah) as to win the actual Oscar.

Trent Reznor won an Oscar, just like Eminem and Bruce Springsteen.

Auto-Tune-ing movies, turning Deathly Hallows, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, Twilight, etc, into musicals? One of the few moments where the show felt relevant and contemporary.

After Marisa Tomei summarized this year's technical awards, James Franco chimes in "Congratulations, nerds."

Sandra Bullock engaging each nominee personally. Too Jeff Bridges: "Dude! Didn't you just win last year? How about you give someone else a chance?" The awards need more of this personal engagement. Don't all these people know each other? Why can't it be more congenial?

I really like the live singing (Celine Dion this year) during the In Memoriam montage.

The Bad

The first thing after the opening monologue was a half-hearted tribute to Gone With The Wind. They didn't even show any clips, just Tom Hanks saying how great it was, then they moved on to something else.

Franco makes a "Winter's Bone" joke? Didn't Mike Myers make that joke on SNL a month ago?

I am all in favor of a tribute to great movie scores, but who chose Star Wars, E.T., and West Side Story to honor? Has no one written a great score in the last 30 years?

Billy Crystal honoring Bob Hope? Really? Aren't there any LESS relevant icons they could honor?

Randy Newman wins Best Song again. The other nominees included a standard Alan Mencken ballad from "Tangled", and a mood piece with, like, three notes, from "127 Hours". This category seems less relevant than ever.

I don't like Gwyneth Paltrow anyway, but her flat, brittle singing of her Best Song nominee was embarrassing. After the last note, you could tell by the scowl on her face that she wasn't happy with it either.

The president of the Academy plus a bigwig from ABC-TV got onstage to announce what a great job ABC does airing the show every year, and how they just signed a contract extension. WHO CARES?! This had to be included on the show?

Oprah hasn't made a movie in 13 years, yet she was onstage presenting Documentary Feature? Coincidentally she's hosting her show from the Oscar stage today. Pretty cozy deal she's lined up.

Anne Hathaway introducing Sandra Bullock as if she were a saint. She's a classy lady who had a shitty year, not Mother Teresa mixed with Meryl Streep.

Why is there a brief and meaningless tribute to the birth of sound film? Another nostalgic look back which contains no actual content and goes nowhere either.

I appreciate the idea of hiring two young, relevant, ostensibly funny actors to host the ceremony, but James and Anne did not match up, their tone was totally imbalanced: James Franco seemed to be totally disengaged, as if he was too cool to act like he cared about movies. Meanwhile, Anne Hathaway was a tireless manic cheerleader, who never missed a chance to mention what introducing the next presenter meant to her. Also, all the whooping was obnoxious.

The Ugly

Three of the most exciting and relevant directors working today (Darren Aronofsky, David Fincher, and David O Russell) are nominated for Best Director and Best Picture... and the statuettes go to Tom Hooper and his very pleasant and well acted but totally old-fashioned King's Speech instead.

130 Warm Spell

2011-02-21T15:26:00.000-05:00

"Silly Love Songs" GLEE Cast Version: I won't apologize for loving this supremely uncool song.
"Plane" Jason Mraz
"I Still Have That Other Girl" Elvis Costello & Burt Bachrach
"Find My Way" The Gabe Dixon Band: the opening credits song from the Sandra Bullock movie The Proposal.
"Gimme Shelter" The Rolling Stones
"Rolling In The Deep" Adele: This whole mix revolves around the awesome song. It totally gives me chills. "Gimme Shelter" is as close as I could come to equaling the drama and goosebumps it evokes.
"Dead American Writers" Tired Pony
"Learning To Fly" Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
"Settled Down Like Rain" The Jayhawks
"Ring of Fire" Johnny Cash
"Home" Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes
"She Runs Away" Duncan Sheik: I have this on an promo only alternative music sampler from 1997.
"Rain In The Summertime" The Alarm
"3,000 Miles" (remix) Ellis Paul [from Sweet Mistakes]
"Windows Are Rolled Down" The first time I heard this new Amos Lee song, I was instantly reminded of "3,000 Miles."
"Run Through The Fields" Does anyone else remember Nuclear Valdez? I have this on a promo only alternative music sampler from 1990.
"Hi Hi Hi" Paul McCartney & Wings
"Jungle Love" Steve Miller Band
"Battlestar Galactica Theme" Jonathan Coulton feat/John Hodgman: Who knew there were words to the Battlestar Galactica theme song?
"Valerie" Mark Ronson feat/Amy Winehouse

129 Twenty Eleven

2011-02-08T10:44:00.000-05:00

"I Got More Than A Feeling" A clever mashup of Boston vs. Black Eyed Peas, from Mad Mix Mustang. Found on Best of Bootie 2009
"Fuck You" Cee Lo Green
"Garbage Truck" Sex Bob-Omb
"Down By The Water" The opening drums-and-harmonica of this new Decemberists song reminds me of a song... or maybe many many songs?
"Settled Down Like Rain" The Jayhawks
"Rocks Off" The Old 97'S cover the Rolling Stones (and R.E.M. too!) on their 2010 Mimeograph EP.
"Up Around The Bend" Creedence Clearwater Revival
"Bossa Nova Baby" This Elvis Presley song was featured during a montage in the movie No Strings Attached.
"California Gurls" (feat. Snoop Dogg) Katy Perry
"Rush" I chose this Big Audio Dynamite II song because it pokes fun at stuffy English aristocracy in the same way the following track does...
"You're A Good Man Albert Brown (Curse You Red Barrel)" The Dukes Of Stratosphear was a 1960s-psychedelic pop side project of XTC. This song has a rustic English beer-barrel pub atmosphere mixed in.
"Effington" Ben Folds Presents : University A Cappella! includes many terrific university groups. This particular track is Ben multi-tracked over and over (with some help from his kids!)
"It Won't Be Long" The Beatles: has some of the same antic energy as "Effington."
"Ain't Good Enough For You" Bruce Springsteen writes these inconsequential freewheeling party rockers all the time, but they usually don't make it onto the album. This one is no different. Bruce recorded it during the Darkness On The Edge of Town sessions. Obviously it doesn't fit with that album's atmosphere, so he sat on it, until the 2010 release of The Promise.
"Stop Playing With My Heart" A fascinating "concept" album, with a authentic 1980s vibe, from Ryan Adams & The Cardinals.
"I'll Be Alright Without You" Journey
"Caravan" Van Morrison
"Boys Don't Cry" I heard this Grant-Lee Phillips cover of the Cure song on his all-covers CD nineteeneighties, and years later on an episode of How I Met Your Mother.
"Stay Gold" Stevie Wonder recorded this treacly ballad in the early 1980s for the movie Rumble Fish. I thought Emily was pulling my leg when she told me this story... until I found it on iTunes!
"Stand Together" The Beastie Boys

Catching Up With Toy Story 3

2011-02-04T17:20:00.000-05:00

I have struggled to see Pixar movies in the theater. The audiences for childrens' movies tend to be filled with children! I finally saw Toy Story 3 on DVD, after everyone on Earth told me how terrific it is, how it will make us all cry forever, and so on. I hold Pixar up to a very high standard.* Eleven years after the first terrific Toy Story sequel, Pixar does not NEED this franchise anymore, so they must have had a good reason to return to it.
Too bad #3 feels like a rewrite of #2. It's as good as #2, but that's not a good enough reason for me! Plenty of spoilers ahead...

In the first two movies, it was easy to draw parallels between the toys' lives and our own. Like the toys, our lives only have meaning as long as someone loves us. In this third movie, the toys' motivations are much less clear. The little boy Andy is now grown up and going off to college, so the toys are bound for the dorm room, or the attic, or the trash. What fate will Andy choose for each of them? Andy chooses to take Woody to college with him, which doesn't seem so great to me: it's only a matter of time before he's turned into a bong. Andy chooses the attic for the remainder of the toys, but due to some clunky plot machinations, they think they've been condemned to the garbage. The toys rationalize that the attic is not so bad; they can play with other toys "and the Christmas decorations are fun." This sounds like a desperate screenwriter in denial to me. The only fates which make any emotional sense to the audience are A> Donated to a young child (reborn), or B> garbage (death). Some kind of dusty purgatory in the attic sounds like a fate worse than the garbage heap. How'd you like to be locked in the attic until the next generation has kids of their own?

After some more implausability, Woody and all the rest end up at a day care center. The toys are all thrilled to be saved from the dump. Win-win, right? Wrong: the toys are ruled with an iron fist by the folksy Southern gentle-bear Lotso. The day care center is a prison for toys: the strong and powerful enjoy a cushy life with the older kids, while the new recruits (our gang) are sent down to be tormented by the toddlers. Are we being told that day care is a living nightmare? That toddlers are terrible monsters? This "day care as prison" metaphor works on the surface, but it only serves as an obstacle to discussing the bigger theme of these movies: what is our purpose in life? Eventually the toys are convinced that anything is better than prison, and besides, Woody's going to miss freshman orientation if they don't bust him out.

Of course their prison escape route is through the garbage chute, and they all end up at the dump anyway. An extremely frightening sequence follows where the toys resign themselves to certain death in the incinerator. This scene disturbed me, and I'm a grown man. I don't see how this movie can be rated G with a scene like this, which would give any child nightmares.

They don't get incinerated, they end up back at Andy's house. Then, through a total cheat of the rules of the Toy Story world**, all the toys are donated to a young girl, just like we knew had to happen somehow.

Now that I've finished poking holes in it, it's NOT as good as number 2. They didn't really need to make another sequel. I'm sorry they did. Then again, they've made Cars 2, a sequel to my least-favorite Pixar movie. Aieee!

*The only two which I don't completely love are A Bug's Life, and Cars. I watched UP on DVD while distracted by caring for my newborn son, so I don't have an opinion of it yet!

**At the end of the movie, all the toys are in a cardboard box in Andy's room. Woody grabs a Post-It note and pen, then forges a message from Andy's mother which convinces Andy to give all his toys to a little girl down the street. The only other time I can remember Woody intervening like this is when he talks to Sid at the end of the first movie. I am sure fans of the movie will say "how is this different from all the other things they do while our backs are turned?" but it felt totally wrong to me.

No Strings Attached

2011-01-22T13:04:00.000-05:00

A surprisingly good, thoughtful, mature, and nuanced romantic sex comedy.
The TV commercials made it look like FuckBuddies: The Movie, but the movie itself does a lot more than that.
Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kutcher) are childhood friends who run into each other every couple of years, When Harry Met Sally style. When Adam's father (Kevin Kline) starts sleeping with Adam's ex girlfriend, he goes on a night of manic drinking. He wakes up naked in Emma's apartment: he didn't have sex with her the night before, but they have a fifteen-years-in-the-making quickie by the dawn's early light.
Thus begins a no-strings-attached sex-only non-friendship. Unlike that episode of Seinfeld, where Jerry and Elaine are exes-turned-friends who want to start having the sex part again, Emma and Adam aren't exes, and they aren't really friends.
Emma refuses to open up emotionally, she uses Adam as a sexual release only. Adam is the romantic puppy dog type, which is against their ground rules, but speaks the truth about what they're both feeling.

The plot and structure break no new ground, but I really appreciated the adult tone, and by "adult", I don't mean gross-out humor, sex talk, or swearing as a punchline, although that stuff is present. What I mean is, the characters talk like real people talk, they swear like real people do. They have impromptu sex, with fumbling of clothes and condom applicating, like real people (just prettier.) On TV and in PG-13 movies, you don't always miss the lack of swearing, until you watch a rated R movie like No Strings Attached, where people talk frankly. At one point in the movie, a character calls another and opens themselves up emotionally...but gets turned down. Their response? "Oh fuck!"
The plot and structure won't win any awards, but the movie gets kudos for not fucking up the ending. The last scene of the movie nearly takes place at a wedding ceremony, but thank God that was avoided.
My review has a twist ending: the movie was directed by Ivan Reitman! He directed Meatballs, Stripes, and Ghostbusters. Since 1984, he's directed ten mostly forgettable movies, and now this. No Strings Attached is hardly a comedy classic, but "thoughtful and nuanced romantic comedy" is okay too.
The Cast: The TV commercials didn't interest me, but once I heard that this movie was above average, I was intrigued to see if Natalie Portman could be funny. Answer: surprisingly YES. She has a couple of funny scenes, especially when she gets drunk. Her drunk walk is terrific, and she goes off on some other drunken skanks like a berzerking hamster. Ashton Kutcher is a foot taller than Portman, and they do make jokes about this in the movie. I never really watched That 70s Show, but I have liked Kutcher since Dude, Where's My Car? He's charming, funny, and pleasantly subtle and vulnerable. Jake Johnson and Ludacris are terrific as Adam's friends. Emma's friends are also great, especially Mindy Kaling. Lake Bell is a manic talkative coworker of Adam's, and who knew she could be funny? She was sexy, tall, and dramatic on the TV show Surface, Alec Baldwin's Amazonian wife in It's Complicated, and somehow she's only 5'8"? She looks seven feet tall!
SEX NOTE: Natalie Portman has had graphic movie sex with two stars of That 70s Show: Kutcher, and Mila Kunis in Black Swan. Topher Grace, call your agent!
TRAILER NOTES: A few weeks ago I saw a preview for this movie plus two others: The Farelly Brothers' new comedy Hall Pass, where two married men are given a week off from their marriages, and Friends With Benefits, which might be the exact same premise as No Strings Attached, except with Justin Timberlake and a different petite brunette from Black Swan (Mila Kunis)? Apparently romantic sex comedies come in threes.
THEATER NOTES: At the Harvard Square Church St Screen 1. Thanks to Amy, Mary Beth, and Laura for coming out to the movies in the subzero temperatures. Especially Laura, who traditionally prefers more explosions and gunfire in her movies! This was one of those Los Angeles Utopia movies which makes you want to move there, and be wealthy, and not have to work. I Love You, Man had the same effect on me. All those t-shirts and jeans, gentle Pacific breezes, and rust-free vintage cars are especially alluring when you're wearing six wool and flannel-lined layers. No one has to park in a snowbank in this movie.

New Year's Weekend Super-Babysitting Movie Madness!

2011-01-05T17:25:00.006-05:00

Four Movies in Four Days

Five years ago, I saw five movies in six days, over the New Year's vacation break. Half a decade later, my wife and I see a combined four in four days...

Date: Thursday December 30

Guys Movie Night: TRON LEGACY 3D

Regal Fenway Screen 13 "Regal Premium eXperience" ($16 per ticket!)

With: Adam, George, Jeff, and Marc

It turns out I was the only one of the five who had seen and remembered the plot of the 1982 TRON. I gave Adam the two-minute plot summary, I condensed that down to 30 seconds for George, then George summed it up as "Jeff Bridges gets sucked into a computer" for Jeff and Marc.

In the wake of The Matrix movies, the world is more than ready for a new TRON movie, and this sequel delivers. Terrific game sequences, the visual effects are great, the music is outstanding, the volume of the sound system was awe-inspiring, and the skintight plastic costumes were jaw-dropping. Seems like we get a lot of those at Guys Movie Night?

I really appreciate the hard work and ambition which went into the "Clu" character, aka, "The Young CGI Jeff Bridges". He looked 98% real. The missing 2% was super-creepy, but I could not look away.

The basic plot is the same as the original ("voyage across computer landscape to destroy evil despot, meet string of strange characters along the way") but the subplots didn't make any sense at all.

Special hooray for the return of Bruce Boxleitner, reprising his role from the original. It's been twelve years since Babylon 5 went off the air, and at age 60 he looks great.

I was surprised at how good Olivia Wilde was as Flynn's adopted program-daughter Quorra. I don't like her on the TV show "House", and I assumed (based on the TV spots) that she was a sex object in this movie, but she actually was kind of like a curious wide-eyed child instead.

Also turning heads was James Frain (True Blood, The Tudors) as Clu's #1 toady Jarvis. Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon, 30 Rock) is ridiculous as Zuse, an albino David Bowie/Sweet Transvestite bar owner. Then again, I saw him in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans as a shirtless, bearded, oily werewolf, and my wife reports he's pretty saucy in Twilight: New Moon, so this role fits right in.
I'm sorry to report Garrett Hedlund doesn't bring a lot to the table, but at least he's more emotive than the Uncanny Valley Jeff Bridges!
Grade: B

Date: Saturday January 1, 2011
My wife saw The Fighter with her sister Sara

Date: Saturday January 1, 2011

Black Swan

West Newton Cinema
With: the wife

In the schizophrenic psycho-sexual thriller Black Swan, Natalie Portman is Nina the ballerina. Nervous, paranoid, underfed, and fragile, her quick shallow breathing marks her at every moment. She is the new lead in Swan Lake. She must become both the good white swan and the opposite black swan. All she wants is perfection, but can she be perfect in a role which requires two opposite personalities? The movie is one endless paranoid dream. We aren't granted one moment to catch our breath. Nina is watched and judged everywhere she goes. She has no privacy. No personal space. Her body is not her own- her mother, her director, her coaches, the costumers, all manhandle and manipulate her body at will. Then she discovers a rival dancer (Mila Kunis) who is either out to destroy her, or unleashing Nina's untapped id...or both. Then the unreal visions creep in, Nina comes totally unhinged, and her body begins to transform, against her will or not, she will become the black swan. This movie scared the heck out of me, and totally disturbed the older conservative crowd at West Newton. It was a little too visceral and Jungian for their taste. I thought it was juicy and terrific. My grade: A-minus

Date: Sunday January 2
The King's Speech
Landmark Kendall Square
With: Adam, Amy, and Kathy

All those nice folks who went to see Black Swan might have been less disturbed by the pleasant heart-warmer The King's Speech.
This is a biopic done right. The King's Speech tells a man's whole life story through one brief but pivotal chapter in his life. No flashbacks to an oppresive childhood, no scenes in old man makeup, just one story, over the course of a year or two, and an interesting piece of British history too: It's the story of "The Reluctant King" George VI (Colin Firth), who ascended to the throne after his elder brother abdicated for love (to a divorced American) in 1936. Besides the fact that Prince "Bertie" Albert never wanted or expected to be King in the first place, he has to become a public speaker despite a crippling stammer.
Thanks to the advent of radio, Bertie has to speak not only to small groups, but to the entire Empire at once, all over the world, on live radio. There is no pre-recording, no tape editing in 1936. Oh, and did I mention World War II is about to start and the Kingdom needs him now more than ever?

Bertie and his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) -- us Yanks remember her as The Queen Mum who lived to 101-- finally turn to unconventional Aussie Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who helps the Prince break through his stammer with pop psychology, simple verbal tricks, and, most importantly, friendship. That sounds super-corny, but Bertie literally has no friends, no one to speak to him bluntly and honestly, no one to order him around. As Lionel says "what are friends for?" Bertie replies "I wouldn't know."

The prospect of watching someone stammer for 90 minutes is daunting, but Colin Firth has such a reservoir of goodwill built up in the hearts of moviegoers, we are pulling for him from the beginning. His performance of the stammer is nowhere near as grating as it could be, yet it feels totally realistic. Helena Bonham Carter is terrific as the Queen Mother; like her husband, she never expected Bertie to become King, so when she meets commoners, she treats the formalities of her rank with an amused detachment.

My grade: A-minus

MPAA Rating Note: The King's Speech is rated "R" for language. This is ridiculous. Prince Albert's therapist encourages him to shout out swear words to loosen him up. Bertie comically yells a string of curse words, including f*** a half-dozen times in a row. Besides this string of f-bombs, the film deserves a "PG" for drinking and smoking. Even the smoking, which some feel should earn any movie an automatic "R" (watch out, 101 Dalmatians and Alice In Wonderland) is presented as an unhealthy crutch. Geoffrey Rush's character points out that cigarettes will kill you, and, much like Julia Roberts in My Best Friend's Wedding, Bertie tends to light up at moments of stress and weakness. On the whole, a pretty good advertisement against smoking, wouldn't you say?

CASTING NOTES: Timothy Spall is great in a small role as Winston Churchill, but I admit I was a little distracted when Spall and Helena Bonham Carter's characters meet at a party. Bellatrix Lestrange and Wormtail? Two Death Eaters at Balmoral Castle? Of course, Dumbledore played the King of England too...

Lionel's wife is played by Jennifer Ehle, best known in her role as Elizabeth Bennet, opposite Colin Firth, in 1995's Pride and Prejudice.

Christmas Mix 2010

2010-12-25T15:38:00.000-05:00

If you never noticed how melancholy many Christmas songs are, you'll notice it here...

"Valley Winter Song" Fountains of Wayne, a bittersweet wintertime travelling song.
"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" U2's soundcheck recording, from the first A Very Special Christmas charity album, is my favorite version of this sad Christmas song.
"Baby It's Cold Outside" Ray Charles & Betty Carter, or, as my wife calls it, the almost date-rape song? No means no, Ray!
"Christmas Wrapping" The Waitresses' charming New Wave white-girl rap. Why hasn't there been a romantic comedy movie based on this song?
"Sleigh Ride" Ella Fitzgerald, a terrific Christmas record.
"Have Yourself Christmas Trouble" Mr Fab & The RIAA rearrange all the words of Bing Crosby's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" to tell a bleaker story: "Hang yourself up upon the highest bough", "Faithful friends who are dear to us, will be far away"...
"Do They Know It's Christmas?" Band Aid was the ideal post New Wave supergroup for me, 12 years old, going on 13, for Christmas 1984.
"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" Judy Garland sings it with the original, super melancholy lyrics.
"I'll Be Home For Christmas" Aimee Mann, another hopeful Christmas song.
"Winter Wonderland" Ray Charles' version, as heard in When Harry Met Sally...
"White Christmas" Clyde McPhatter & The Drifters, maybe my favorite recording of this song.
"Evil Santa" Bill Murray & Gilda Radner, from the National Lampoon Radio Hour.
"Santa Claus is Coming To Town"[live] One of my all-time favorite Bruce Springsteen performances. Electric!
"Christmas Song" [live] Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds
"Let It Snow" Vaughn Monroe, as heard at the end of Die Hard.
"Auld Lang Syne" [live] Guy Lombardo
"Skating" Vince Guaraldi Trio

(I assembled this mix in 2010 but never posted it to the blog until 2011. That's why it's backdated to 12/25/2010.)

128 Teenage Dream

2010-12-12T10:11:00.000-05:00

"Holiday" Vampire Weekend
"No One's Gonna Love You" Band Of Horses: I bought this song after Cee Lo Green covered it on this new album.
"Sweet Thing" Van Morrison
"Teenage Dream" Glee Cast Version: No one's going to believe me when I say I have no patience for the TV show, but I love The Warblers cover songs. This one gives me chills.
"Satisfied" Cee Lo Green: Anyone who wears their love of Prince so proudly has my support.
"I Would Die 4 U" Prince & The Revolution
"Blue Jean" David Bowie: I used to try to minimize the number of songs which reappeared on mixes over and over again. Over the years this habit became calcified to the point where mixes were loaded with: new songs + old songs which I didn't love. I am trying to loosen up and include some "golden oldies" where appropriate!
"The Suburbs" Arcade Fire: I like this song, even if the rhythm section is super-cliche'd, and it's a little too long.
"You Are The Best Thing" Ray LaMontagne: great fun, even if he's super derivative.
"The Difference" The Wallflowers
"The Word" The Beatles
"Way Down Now" World Party
"Ruthless People" Mick Jagger: The edit of this song which opens the eponymous movie is much shorter and better. This one drags on for 4m30s.
"I Belong To The Band" Mavis Staples
"Crazy About You" Whiskeytown
"No More No More" Aerosmith: Does anyone remember when Aerosmith was an active rock and roll band which didn't record ballads for movies? Me neither.
"It's Only Wednesday" Crash Kings: I think I heard this song in the movie Zombieland?
"Valerie" The Zutons: what the heck is a Zuton?

"Recycled" Cover Songs: Yankee Swap 2010

2010-12-11T09:19:00.000-05:00

The theme of the Yankee Swap this year was "Recycled Christmas" so I assembled (with editing help from Emily) an all-covers mix:

"I Saw Her Standing There" The Smithereens recorded their own song-by-song remake of Meet The Beatles, called Meet The Smithereens.
"Don’t Bring Me Down" (Live) The New Pornographers covering the ELO classic, Live from Soho.
"Hackensack" (Live) Katy Perry unplugged, covering Fountains of Wayne. Who knew she had such good taste?
"Every Little Thing (He) Does Is Magic" From Shawn Colvin's all-covers album Cover Girl
"Burning Down the House" A terrific remake of The Talking Heads from Bonnie Raitt's live Road Tested album. Perhaps the most radical remake of the mix.
"It's My Life" It's great to hear a remake of a New Wave one-hit wonder, especially so well done by No Doubt.
"Any Major Dude Will Tell You" Wilco covers Steely Dan for the Me, Myself, and Irene movie soundtrack.
"This Charming Man" Death Cab For Cutie increases the tempo on this Smiths classic. From their CD You Can Play These Songs With Chords.
"Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing Baby" An Ashford & Simpson oldie from Michael McDonald's Motown album.
"Everyday Is A Winding Road" Who knew Prince was a Sheryl Crow fan?
"Train In Vain (Stand By Me)" Annie Lennox covers The Clash on her all-covers CD Medusa.
"Teenage Dream" This a capella cover of Katy Perry might be the most exciting performance I've ever heard on the TV show Glee.
"People Get Ready" In the a capella theme, The Housemartins cover Curtis Mayfield's song on their album London 0 Hull 4 (that might be a soccer reference?)
"High & Dry" British wunderkind jazz pianist Jamie Cullum covers Radiohead on this album Twentysomething.
"Mrs. Robinson" The Lemonheads' cover of Simon & Garfunkel was a late addition to their album It's A Shame About Ray... after it was a surprise hit as a standalone single.
"Whole Lotta Love" Carlos Santana's manager must have noticed there's two types of albums which aging icons sell well-- covers albums and collaborations. Why not put them together for Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics Of All Time? Chris Cornell was born to sing Led Zeppelin.
"...Baby One More Time" I think Fountains Of Wayne covered Britney Spears ironically. From their odd-and-ends collection Out-Of-State Plates.
"I Will Survive" I know for certain that Cake covered this Gloria Gaynor disco classic ironically. From their CD Fashion Nugget.
"In Between Days" Ben Folds covers the awesome Cure song on his EP Speed Graphic.
"Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word" Ray Charles & Elton John duet on Ray's album Genius Loves Company.
"More Than This" The Charlie Hunger Quartet are joined by Norah Jones on the Roxy Music song, on their CD Songs from the Analog Playground.
"Green Onions" Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers cover the Booker T & The MG's instrumental -- best known as the song they play during pitching changes at baseball games -- on their Live Anthology box set.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1

2010-11-19T11:44:00.005-05:00

A terrific adaptation of the first half of the final Harry Potter book. Thank goodness they didn't try to cram the whole book into two or three hours!

Things they got right:

I liked seeing Hermione wiping herself from her parents' lives.
The battle in the coffee shop: I loved the dodging, the loud cracks, the flying pots and cups.
The bottomless beaded handbag looked great. I loved watching Hermione sink elbow-deep into the bag, also, the sound of her library stack falling over.
I loved the comedy of Harry, Ron, and Hermione creeping around the Ministry as Albert Runcorn, Reg Cattermole, and Mafalda Hopkirk. When I read the book, I hoped they would NOT use Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson in these scenes. I was excited at the prospect of three unknown actors playing them for the whole sequence, and I was not disappointed (see photo + my notes, below.)
Ron's splinch wounds were very scary. The way he was moaning and panting on the ground was perfect.
Harry and Ron discovering the sword in the frozen pond was just as I imagined.
When the locket Horcrux finally opens, the black cloud of Voldemort's soul is bigger and more terrifying than I imagined. I found Ron's "visions" of Harry and Hermione very creepy, and their nude kissing was just gross! Emily said "they look like Japanese anime characters!"
Bathilda Bagshot was very creepy, with her bulging, watery eyes.
The tale of the Three Brothers was nicely portrayed, silouhette-style, almost like paper marionettes.
Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis) was great (and very tall!) with his one line aboard the Hogwarts Express: "Hey losers, he's not here!" According to the end credits, the camera must have panned past every Hogwarts student we know in that one shot! I didn't notice, but according to the IMDb, Lavender Brown, Romilda Vane, Goyle, Cho Chang, Katie Bell, Zabini, McLaggen, Pansy Parkinson, and Padma Patil were all aboard.
Kreacher and Dobby looked A. maz. ing! They looked really real. They made Gollum look like a sock puppet.

Things I missed

In the book, when the Death Eaters ambush Harry's escape from Privet Drive, they discover he's the "real" Harry because he doesn't shoot to kill the Imperiused Stan Shunpike. Later, Lupin lectures him on this point. In the movie, Harry releases Hedwig from her cage before they depart. She later defends Harry from the Death Eaters, which tips them off to his identity. Harry has had to carry around that ginormous birdcage in every story. It's a big pain in the storytelling butt. In the book, Hagrid's sidecar is big enough to hold Harry and a giant birdcage? I bet the screenwriter rewrote the scene so the director would not have to show a sidecar so enormous that a 17-year-old boy and a giant birdcage both fit inside. It makes more sense for Harry to release the owl, but why would the Death Eaters know that that owl is Harry's owl anyway? Very clunky.
When George loses his ear in the book, it's really gone, like Reservoir Dogs gone. I think the director didn't have the nerve to show a severed ear-hole in his movie.
In the book, it feels like Voldemort is breathing down their necks the whole time they're on the run. When they're captured by the Snatchers, it feels like he's going to apparate at any moment. Heck, he's in the same room with Harry and Hermione as they escape Nagini at Bathilda Bagshot's house. In the movie, Voldemort spends his time searching for the Elder Wand, but I never felt that creeping doom of his iminient appearance. The scariest moment of the book is when Harry and Hermione are struggling to escape from Nagini. Nagini has just summoned Voldemort. Voldemort runs up the cottage stairs (very scary Jung-ian moment), and enters the room just as Harry and Hermione fling themselves out the window and disapparate. I was sad that that moment was missing.
My wife is always frustrated that Nymphadora Tonks (Natalia Tena) only gets one line in each movie.

Mafalda Hopkirk (Hermione), Harry (in Albert Runcorn's clothes), Mary Cattermole, and Reg Cattermole (Ron) escape the Dementors at the Ministry.

When I read Deathly Hallows, I was excited to see Mafalda Hopkirk make a reappearance. Actually "reappearance' is the wrong word, because the last time we heard from Mafalda, it was her voice only: Jessica Stevenson was the voice of Hopkirk, emanating from a magical letter, in Order of the Phoenix. Why should I care about such a marginal character? I am a huge fan of Jessica Stevenson for co-creating and co-starring on the terrific TV show SPACED, with Simon Pegg. We only heard her voice in Phoenix, so when I read she was returning to the screen in Hallows, I was excited that she might show her face at last? And I was doubly excited, because in Hallows she would appear in the flesh, but her voice would be "looped in" by Emma Watson. How delicious that she would appear "voice only" in the fifth movie, and "body only" in the seventh!Alas, it was not to be. Instead, Mafalda Hopkirk's body is played by Sophie Thompson, sister of Professor Trelawney herself, Emma Thompson. I know Sophie Thompson best as Bride # 2 Lydia, in Four Weddings & A Funeral.

THEATER NOTES: With my lovely wife and the lovely Laura, Showcase Cinemas Du Lux (screen 7) at Legacy Place, Dedham. This was the second time I spent the big bucks for the "lux level" seating (21+, super-cushy leather reserved seating, wait service in the theater) but I don't think I'll do it again. The seats are great, and it's nice to have popcorn and beer brought to my seat, but the price is steep ($25, minus $5 food credit) and they leave the lights on dim so guests can see their food.

The Social Network

2010-11-13T15:38:00.000-05:00

When the airwaves and interwebs were clogged with commercials for The Social Network, I told anyone who would listen that I would rather stab myself in the face than see this movie. I suspected that a movie about a smug teenage billionaire, lording his genius over the rest of us, would be unwatchable. Mark Zuckerberg was born in 1984 for crying out loud!

However, the reviews made me less suspicious, so the wife and I saw it this weekend, and we both liked it very much.

The structure is a Citizen Kane-esque postmortem for the rise of an empire. Told via two depositions, the lengthy (voiceover-free) flashbacks show us how vindictive wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg invented the online social network- taking the whole social experience of college and putting it online. Zuckerberg is touched with the Aspberger's so he doesn't know how to connect emotionally. His only emotional outlet is in front of a computer, so it's a natural evolution for him to create a new social world online, in his own element. Force people to interact online instead of in person.

My fears about the smug factor were resolved in the first scene. The Thirsty Scholar, Cambridge, 2003. Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard sophomore, is on a date with his girlfriend. When he lets slip that he considers her intellectually inferior (she goes to BU!) she dumps him. He doesn't understand that it's not enough to regret calling your girlfriend inferior, you have to not honestly feel that way too. By the time this scene was over, I pitied him already. As the story progressed, it was hard to keep feeling bad for a young man who screws over everyone he knows, but it's also hard to hate someone so lonely and lost.

Director David Fincher has bounced back after the boring and obvious Benjamin Button. The Social Network is Fincher's most conventional movie. I found his gloomy, schellacked lighting distracting. Many scenes were filtered through an amber patina. Is this 2004 or 1904? Some of the most ordinary scenes seemed...sinister, somehow. Maybe I still have the heebie-jeebies leftover from Zodiac? The only special effect I noticed was the Winklevoss Twins. One actor, Armie Hammer, plays twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, just two of the associates Zuckerberg climbs over on the way to the top. I honestly have not seen this actor in anything before, but, while watching him onscreen playing both roles, I thought something was odd. I thought to myself: leave it to David Fincher to use a computer to turn one actor into twins! Are there really no twin actors out there who could have played these roles? It must be nice for Fincher to have that kind of clout.

Aaron Sorkin's adapted screenplay is excellent. He takes the story of a introverted, friendless nerd genius, and turns it into The Movie of the Millenials. When the spurned Zuckerberg drunkenly blogs about the "bitch" who just broke up with him, it felt like the first chapter in the history of The Blogging Generation.

The movie is also full of technical details, both computer details and big business details, and Sorkin's screenplay makes all of it simple to grasp. The only clunky parts include Rashida Jones's unfortunate role as a "script device"; she's just a cog in the storytelling machine.

Our only gripe, and it's a big one, is the appalling depiction of women. All of the female students and girlfriends in the movie are mindless, silly, drunk sex objects, and/or crazy and paranoid. Sorkin and Fincher's loathing for the female species is transparent. I'm not asking them to invent a equally intelligent female nerd, like Demi Moore as the female lawyer in A Few Good Men, but do we need the bimbos playing video games on the sofa? When a character asks them which weapons they're using, they giggle "We don't know how it works. We're just pressing all the buttons!" Moments later, the girls are falling over each other to smoke a five-foot-long bong.

It wasn't only the structure which reminded me of Citizen Kane: we try to understand the solitary billionaire entrepreneur, who he threw under the bus along the way: was reaching the top of the pile worth the cost? At the end of Citizen Kane, we learn that Kane would have given it all up to return to his youthful innocence; at the end of The Social Network, Citizen Zuckerberg has it all to himself, literally.

We saw The Social Network at the Church Street Harvard Square theater, which seemed appropriate considering the setting of the film. I was pleasantly surprised to find the film still showing on the big Screen #1, six weeks after its debut. I suppose a movie set at Harvard, starring the latest billionaire Harvard dropout, gets preferential treatment.

NOTE: At one point, a character points out that Zuckerberg in 2003 was the most talked-about person on the Harvard campus, a campus which includes Nobel laureates, Olympic athletes, and a movie star. That movie star was Natalie Portman, who got her bachelor's degree in 2003. This is the same movie star I spotted in Davis Square in 2001!

127 The Whiskey River

2010-11-01T16:44:00.000-04:00

The first four tracks on this mix all clumped together. I started with "Horchata", from Vampire Weekend's second album Contra. (FYI, a horchata is a traditional beverage, made of ground almonds, sesame seeds, rice, barley, or tigernuts.) With "Horchata" as the germ, I built three other songs with fun and exotic instrumentation around it: the pseudo-reggae of "Last Night", the steel drums of the least-cool Rod Stewart song ever, and the accordion of "Gumboots", from Paul Simon's Graceland (aka "You don't feel you could love me/But I feel you could")

"Last Night" Traveling Wilburys
"Horchata" Vampire Weekend
"Love Touch" Rod Stewart
"Gumboots" Paul Simon
"Peace Train" 10,000 Maniacs; I just saw Yusuf, aka Cat Stevens, at Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity.
"An Innocent Man" Billy Joel
"Sentimental Heart" She & Him
"Ruby Tuesday" The Rolling Stones
"Summer" Buffalo Tom
"We Are Sex Bob-Omb" from Sex Bob-Omb dovetails nicely into...
"Yer Blues" The Beatles
"Rollin' and Tumblin'" Muddy Waters inspired the title of this mix:

If the river was whiskey, and I was a divin' duck
I would dive to the bottom, never would I come up

"Damn Good" David Lee Roth: Have you ever completely forgotten a song? Forgotten a song so completely that you don't even remember knowing it in the first place? I recently bought David Lee Roth's solo CD Skyscraper for $1. David Lee Roth's solo career took off when I was a teenage Van Halen fan, so me and my friends had a lot of loyalty to Diamond Dave. I wanted the CD for the hit single "Living In Paradise", but for the heck of it I listened to the whole disc one day. That's when I rediscovered "Damn Good", an acoustic ballad (with nice guitar work from Steve Vai.) It's NOT a "damn good" song, BUT the point is, I had not heard the song in 22 years! It was weird dusting the cobwebs off this teenage memory.
"Put Me On Top" Aimee Mann
"Bang Bang Bang" Tracy Chapman
"Smoke On The Water" Deep Purple
"Hunger Strike" Temple of the Dog
"I Hate Myself For Loving You" Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, the original version, before it was appropriated for Monday Night Football.
"I Love Your Smile" Shanice I think I added this song because I saw someone on TV named Shanice?
"Shadowboxer" Fiona Apple

Catching Up On DVD

2010-10-31T13:33:00.001-04:00

We're paying for the luxury of Netflix. DVDs sit on our TV for weeks and weeks, unwatched, while we rack up the monthly fees. I am not complaining, but it's very satisfying to check off some "we missed it in the theater" titles. We finally watched three DVDs in a week, and all three provoked strong feelings. This blog is dedicated to meticulously documenting every movie I see in the theater. I usually don't review movies I see at home, but this trio of features are worth a few comments.

(500) Days of Summer Summer the movie (and the woman) flouted all my expectations, and left me confused, angry, and bewildered by the end of the movie. The premise is simple, it's your standard romantic comedy... except Summer (Zooey Deschanel) approaches relationships the way men do with impunity, and her would-be boyfriend Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is the overly romantic antagonist who lets himself get hurt by asking for more than Summer wants to give. I don't know if I was more upset as a man, or as a fan of romantic comedies! The way Summer treats Tom seems cruel, but men act exactly like her in rom-coms all the time. Fair's fair, I guess. I also have to credit the movie for it's clever structure. Plenty of films jump around in time, but (500) Days of Summer uses the 500 days as an odometer of the relationship, and each vignette is prefaced with the appropriate day value. A couple of notes about the music- I have been annoyed by the overly "we're too cool for ourselves" soundtracks on young-adult comedies lately (Juno and Adventureland spring to mind), but (500) does not have that problem- there's some drunken kareoke to "Here Comes Your Man", a nice Bruce Springsteen joke, and a joyous dream-dance sequence set to "You Make My Dreams" by the #1 rock duo of all time, Hall & Oates.

Shutter Island This is the movie I most wanted to see in the theater, and never made it. Scorsese has made a 1960s style gothic thriller, but the explicit violence towards children, and the many many loose threads of the storytelling spoil any chance of satisfaction for me. I don't insist that mystery movies be solvable before the truth is revealed, but Shutter Island goes in 5 directions at once.

Paranormal Activity I like scary movies, but I am not interested in explicit gore and torture, which is so popular among the "torture porn" of the Saw/Hostel crew. So when I heard that there was a new creepy horror movie in the mold of The Blair Witch Project, I was eager to check it out. I watched it by myself, alone in the house, with all the lights out. This movie scared the shit out of me. It's a haunted condo horror movie- the couple never leaves their 3BR two-level home for the entire movie. this may be my new standard for claustrophobia. Besides being totally fucking scary without one ounce of blood or one inch of ghosts, it's also a metaphor for bad relationships- Katie is haunted by a demon, and her douche boyfriend of three years Micah never takes her seriously. He actually makes things worse over and over- he felt like a very familiar character; the man whose juvenile ego doesn't know how to manage threats to his authority. When a psychic tells them that negative energy feeds the demon and makes things worse, all she would need to do to be free of the demon is kick her dickish boyfriend out. I have only two complaints; the scary bits are still haunting me, and I wish Katie had shown more confidence instead of pleading for help and resigning herself to her doom for the entire movie.

The next movie on the way from Netflix is sure not to anger or scare me: Hot Tub Time Machine. Let the healing begin!

Nowhere Boy

2010-10-29T14:32:00.001-04:00

I'm a big Beatles fan, and I have always known that John Lennon had an emotionally turbulent adolescence, but I didn't realize the depth of the emotional stress, and the potential as a heartwrenching drama, until I saw Nowhere Boy. After seeing this movie, you'll have a new-found understanding of why Lennon was such an angry asshole for the whole of the 1960s, and his belated emotional rehabilitation (and image reinvention as a peaceful hippie) from 1969 forwards will make a lot more sense.

Aaron Johnson is terrific as Lennon. He looks enough like him not to be distracting, the accent is authentic, not a Yellow Submarine-style "Liverpool" copycat, and when he wields a classic Lennon cutting remark, the wit feels all too familiar. It's funny in A Hard Day's Night when Lennon is playing himself for laughs, but when he does it in order to make his mother cry, it's heartbreaking.
Only a Beatlemaniac would care about the performances of Lennon's family, so I'll just say that Kristin Scott-Thomas is just how I pictured Lennon's sourpuss-but-loving Aunt Mimi. Anne-Marie Duff plays his mother Julia as a bipolar damaged woman who develops an unhealthy attachment to her estranged teenage son.
As for the rest of the Fab Four, we get to see The Day John Met Paul reenacted (July 6, 1957), which gave me chills, and the day George auditioned for the band, just like I pictured.
Thomas Sangster (last seen as the 11-year-old drummer in Love Actually) looks nothing like Paul McCartney, but he's perfect anyways, with his pink cheeks and skinny fifteen-year-old body. When he auditions for John on "Twenty-Flight Rock", I was convinced. (The kid playing George only has two lines.)
October 23, West Newton Cinema, Screen 4 again, just like Howl ten days earlier.

Howl

2010-10-13T14:11:00.000-04:00

A wild ride through Allen Ginsberg's epic poem, and the obscenity trial which followed. The movie's dialogue is taken completely from three real world sources: the poem itself, read by Ginsberg in a coffeehouse and set to psychedelic animation, James Franco plays Ginsberg as he's interviewed in his apartment, where he tells some of his life story mixed with the making of the poem, and court transcripts brought to life by an all-star cast. I strongly recommend this movie to those who don't know the poem. The surreal animated imagery which accompanies the poem is mostly faithful to the imagery of the poem- it doesn't become too abstract. Another way of saying it is the animated imagery serves the words of the poem rather than serving itself, which is a good thing.
James Franco is terrific as the garrulous poet. He nails the intellectual stoner visionary vibe perfectly. The court scenes feel a bit like a wax museum; because we know that the dialog is taken exactly from the record, the performances feel a little wooden, but there's also a trippy time-travel "real people actually said these things" vibe too.
THEATER NOTES: The wife and I caught Howl at the West Newton Cinema, home of some of the most self-involved, overly entitled, obnoxious moviegoers ever. I've had some bad experiences there, but this was not one of them- we saw Howl on Screen 4 (capacity 96) on a midweek evening. We almost had the theater to ourselves, a rare occurrence indeed, but alas, one other couple joined us. Seeing a movie in an empty theater always makes me fantasize about being a millionaire with my own screening room- I want a little hand-held intercom, where I can phone up to the booth and have Murray spool up the flick for us, and ask Skip to send down some popcorn while you're at it?

Trailer Review: The Tourist

2010-09-20T14:45:00.001-04:00

The Tourist appears to be a remake of Knight And Day with the sexes reversed. I don't know if it's supposed to be a action thriller with funny bits, or a screwball comedy with some action, but God Bless Johnny Depp; he can't seem to NOT be funny.

The Town

2010-09-19T12:34:00.017-04:00

A terrific heist thriller. Ben Affleck now has to be taken seriously as a director. Gone Baby Gone was no fluke; The Town is more of a genre action thriller, and less of a film noir than GBG was, but he's made a cracking bundle of excitment, soaked in Bostoniana.
Affleck is Doug MacRay, the brains behind a bank-robbing crew. During a daylight heist in Harvard Square, they take a tall dark drink of water, Claire, as a hostage (Rebecca Hall). They let Claire go during their getaway, but it turns out she lives in Charlestown too- does she know too much? Will she talk to the Feds? MacRay, hungry to escape suffocating Charlestown, latches onto Claire as his one chance at going legit. Meanwhile, Doug's lifelong friend/ex - con/loose cannon/sociopath Jem (the excellent Jeremy Renner) won't let Doug walk away, while continuing to endanger Doug's life.
MacRay's crew is tracked by Jon Hamm's FBI Special Agent Frawley, who's not above bending some rules to make his case. Hamm brings an edge of anger to his all-American face, which only boils over when he's beating suspects and taunting criminals to get what he wants.
Speaking as a lifelong resident of the Commonwealth, The Town is the most "Boston" movie I have ever seen. I feel like I have walked past every location a hundred times. When Affleck's Charlestown crew are fleeing a heist in the North End, there's an authentic car chase around the twisty North End streets. When Jon Hamm's FBI agent catches the flash on the radio, he hollers "Close the fucking bridge!" Any Boston resident knows exactly what he's talking about. The verisimilitude felt good.

(NOTE: If you want to avoid a Boston-based movie with the least-realistic chase scene ever, Blown Away (1994) is the movie for you, featuring a 2-minute-long chase scene on Beacon Hill's Joy Street, which is like four blocks long!)

Then there's the dialog- Affleck doesn't care if anyone understands all the dialog, it's so mumbly and slangy, it was impossible for me to pick it all out. The nice thing about a genre movie is that you don't need to know all the words to follow along.
If I have one complaint, it's that the movie feels like it was cut down from a Heat-sized three-hour epic to a brisk two hours. This means there's lots of intriguing threads which are either never explored, or only glimpsed. I don't really need to know why Agent Frawley has a burr up his ass, or the story behind Frawley's townie partner and his roots in Charlestown.

NOTE: The townie cop is played by Titus Welliver, whom I'm adding to my Hey! It's That Guy! club. He made his debut in Navy Seals as "Redneck in Bar", played a cop in Oliver Stone's The Doors, played Al Capone in Mobsters, then proceeded to appear on every dramatic TV show of the last 20 years.

We're given hints that Doug may have fathered a child with Jimmy's sister (Blake Lively in full bar tramp mode.) Victor Garber has two lines as a bank manager, and gets a rifle butt to the face for his trouble? (NOTE: Garber co-starred with Affleck's wife Jennifer Garner on Alias) It's possible that The Town was a terrible movie when all the footage was first assembled, and a gem was carved out of it.

OK I have one more small complaint: [SPOILER ALERT] the movie might be a little too beholden to genre conventions, so when it breaks those conventions in uninteresting ways, I was confused. For example, Claire works at the bank the gang robs at the opening of the movie. They take her hostage while they make their escape; she's blindfolded, so she can't see their faces. Later, Doug befriends her, and they begin to fall in love, while she doesn't know his secret. In my opinion, the traditional resolution would be that Claire figures out for herself that Doug is one of the men who robbed her bank; but it doesn't resolve that way. I found this odd and confusing, especially when the rest of the movie followed heist thriller conventions in a regular way.

I saw The Town with my friends Amy and Adam at the Capitol Theater in Arlington; apparently English-born Adam could understand the dialog better than Amy or me! As the credits rolled, I gave it an A grade; since then, when I see commercials for the movie on TV, I rewind and watch them twice. I think this means I want to see it again!
NOTE: I was it again, this time with my wife, September 25 at the AMC Aviation 12, Linden NJ, with Becca & Vinnie. The digital projection and sound were excellent; I was able to understand a lot more of the dialog this time.

Ben Affleck Aging Timeline

2010-09-17T16:04:00.005-04:00

Ben Affleck, a life in photos. Not included, the goatee'd Affleck from Chasing Amy (1997)!

Sauron Baby Pictures

2010-09-09T16:02:00.002-04:00

There's no thumbnail on this post because it's too funny to spoil the surprise. Trust me!

126: Summerbeast

2010-09-01T15:32:00.000-04:00

"Run" Vampire Weekend
"Driver 8" The Old '97s. A slightly harder-rocking, slightly less subtle version of one of my favorite R.E.M. songs.
"Whisper to a Scream (Birds Fly)" Icicle Works. Rediscovered on a VH1 1980s video showcase.
"Jealous Again" The Black Crowes. A live, in-studio, acoustic performance, from the new Crowes album.
"Never" Heart. So richly imbued with Eighties-ness, it's hard to mix this track among other less exuberantly artifical songs...
"TiK ToK" ...until Ke$ha came along.
"Wash Your Face In My Sink" The Dream Warriors. Was this Canadian hip-hop duo a one-hit wonder, or was this song popular only among me and my friends at WERS in 1991?
"The Distance" Cake. Before I met my wife, I only new Cake as the 1990s alt rock band which covered "I Will Survive". I mostly hate disco, and this Gloria Gaynor song is one of my least-favorite hits in a genre I hate already. To sum up: Cake's cover is a boring, overlong, overly ironic remake of a song I hated in the first place. It turns out my wife has, like, four Cake CDs, and in the intervening years, I have found a bunch of their songs I actually like, including "The Distance", one of my new ringtones.
"Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" I don't listen to Jimi Hendrix enough. I gotta start putting him on more mix CDs. Mostly this song makes me think of a) hippies, and b) that scene it's in in Almost Famous, when the band trades in their bus for the jet plane.
"Free Fallin" [live], from the comprehensive new Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers Live Anthology. Great sing-along from the audience.
"One True Love" Semisonic is another one-hit 1990s alt-rock band, whom I have gotten to know better. Around the turn of the century I really got into their almost-hit "Chemistry", and later, the drummer wrote a memoir which could have been titled "What It's Like To Be A One Hit Wonder."If you want to dig deeper into 1990s nostalgia, check it out. Jen Trynin also wrote a book about her year in the spotlight, which could have been called "I Would Have Been Alanis Morrisette (If It Weren't For Alanis Morrisette.)"
"Via Chicago" Wilco. We went to Wilco's music and arts festival in North Adams this summer. This track is from Wilco's album Summerteeth.
"Stratford-On-Guy" Liz Phair. I have the complete Rolling Stone magazine, cover-to-cover, on DVD (1967-2007.) Around the time I was assembling this mix I re-read Liz' 1994 Rolling Stone cover story.
"Do You Love Me" Ridiculously catchy new Guster song, with pleasant Wall of Sound production.
"Can't Do A Thing (To Stop Me)" Chris Isaak. Apparently there's a cable channel called FUSE, which aired a special Fifty Sexiest Music Videos Ever. My wife and I were not surprised to find the "Wicked Game" video at Number One, which inspired including this Isaak song.
"Hackensack" [live, acoustic] The fact that Katy Perry has heard Fountains of Wayne, and recorded a nice cover song, has raised my opinion of her. It's still unfortunate that she married Russell Brand.
"Ugly Truth Rock" Matthew Sweet
"1901" Phoenix. It's like Duran Duran and Joy Division had a love child in France with Bryan Ferry as the midwife.
"Pictures of Matchstick Men" Camper Van Beethoven
"It Ain't The Cold War Harry" Grant-Lee Phillips

Dads Movie Night: Scott Pilgrim vs The World

2010-08-27T06:57:00.013-04:00

Did you ever play that game "The Movie Of My Life"? I went to school with a guy who looks just like Michael Cera.
Let's start with the skin: it's not so much that his skin has NO pigment, it's more that the skin once knew the light of day, but he's been secluded for many years in... a cave, or the dark side of the moon, or Canada, so his skin is now a marble gray color. His elbows and knees are knobby, the knuckles are pink, there's a comical lack of a chin (which the nose makes up for), and the hair. Oh the hair. Scott Pilgrim's hair is a unkempt thatch of thick brownness which is the utter despair of said Mr. Pilgrim.
This collision of awkwardness, embodied by Mister Hooded Sweatshirt himself, Michael Cera, is one of the enduring highlights of Scott Pilgrim vs The World: Pilgrim is the hero of the movie. Pilgrim endures ass kickings, brick-wall hole-making, steel beam-denting, and he not only survives, he returns in equal measure and destroys his enemies.
The premise of the movie is simple: what if our romantic and emotional battles were actual battles? And what if you are a total postmodern, 21st century baby who was born with a game controller in your hand, and you know the Super Mario Bros theme better than your national anthem? That's this movie. It's a treat to live in a world where a pasty stuttering geek can win epic battles thanks to his pure spirit, his love, and his nice-guyness... even if he loses a bass guitar solo duel!

Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Grindhouse) is simply a quintessential beauty. She doesn't even have to try hard. Kieran Culkin, last seen drinking too much Pepsi ("he's gonna wet the bed!") in Home Alone, is perfect as the wry gossipy roommate who's gay, but doesn't have to be, to be terrific.
I also love Aubrey Plaza (Parks & Recreation), as a brittle frenemy, and the rest of Pilgrim's band (Sex Bob-omb): newcomers Alison Pill (the caustic ex-girlfriend/drummer), Mark Webber (the emotional guitarist 'Stephen Stills'), and Johnny Simmons (the simple but kind roadie "Young Neil").
Director, producer, and co-screenwriter Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) lives in this world. He breathes it. He soaks the world of the movie in console gameland effortlessly. Wright's bag of magic tricks is effortless. Circa 1999, Wright produced and directed a TV comedy for BBC called "Spaced", about a group of underemployed twenty-somethings, whose love for movies and video games envelops their daily life. Spaced serves as kind of a proto-template for SPvTW, and I strongly recommend it. There are 14 episodes total, available on a two-disc DVD set.
The movie is paced like a rocket shot out of a cannon, on board the Concorde: it keeps moving and moving, and even the parts where no one's being disintegrated move along at a nice clip. The wit does not slow down to let the slowest 10% of the audience catch up: even the fastest mind will miss some of the fun the first time. Much like Hot Fuzz, this movie will reward repeat viewing.
The music is terrific, the dialog is smart and catchy, the costumes are cool, especially for Canada, and the video-game style visual enhancements are subtle enough, also varied and inventive. WARNING: If you were born before, say, 1969, you may hate this movie. I was born in 1972 and I'm giving it an A grade, even if I prefer first-person shooters and driving games over chopy-socky fighting.
THEATER NOTES: I went to see SPvTW at the Somerville Theater with new Dad George D, who enjoyed his much-needed night off! Apparently this movie is based on a comic book, or graphic novel, because George and I were literally surrounded by super-nerds who LOVED the movie, who hooted and hollered appreciatively every time something cool, or something faithful to the source material happened. There were patchy beards and overlong hair every where! (NOTE: I saw it again September 5 with my lovely wife)
TRAILERS: We saw a teaser trailer for a SMURFS movie. Oh. My. God it looks terrible. It's not as if the Smurfs are some sacred part of my cultural heritage, but does anyone really want to see this? I guess if they made TWO Chipmunks movies, and a Marmaduke movie, anything's possible.

Better Off Dead...

2010-08-26T10:11:00.001-04:00

When Gran agreed to babysit, the wife and I made plans to see a movie. But what movie? August is le season mort at the cinema. Neither of us were really in the mood for Toy Story 3. I am planning on seeing Scott Pilgrim vs The World Friday night with George. There wasn't much left... until I remembered Somerville's free outdoor movies. The final feature of the summer, the Viewer's Choice: BETTER OFF DEAD! Actually, we owe a thanks to Amy, who is the Queen of the Outdoor Movie! She has kept us updated with free outdoor movie bulletins.
I have seen Better Off Dead (1985) many many times. I used to own the discount-bin laser disc! When I was a DJ and producer in Portland ME, I created a Christmas-themed bumper featuring Ricky's Mom: "Do you have Christmas in France? Crisssssmassss..." I actually paid money to see it at the Brattle Theater in December 2002.
It's still silly and funny, with a skinny 18-year-old John Cusack, Curtis "Booger" Armstrong as the world's oldest high school student, and a schizophrenic soundtrack: Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, and Muddy Waters (good), Howard Jones and Thompson Twins (bad). Then there's the laughably bad pop from schlockmeister Rupert Hine; he contributes several songs, including the saxophone-infected love theme "Arrested By Love" ("I've been arrested by love/Take me in")
It's the directing debut of the immortal Savage Steve Holland, who completed his feature film directing career with One Crazy Summer (1986) and How I Got Into College (1989). While he has had a steady career in TV, he has never directed a feature film again. (Powderhouse Park, Somerville, with Amy and Mary Beth)

Clooney Seal of Approval

2010-08-19T14:18:00.016-04:00

My admiration for George Clooney has been growing the last few years, but I just realized how dependable he is when I saw a TV spot for his new movie, The American. I thought to myself "ooh, I gotta go see that." I like suspense thrillers with snipers, footchases, and exotic women as much as the next guy, but The American has real potential, thanks to The George Clooney Seal of Quality. Starting with From Dusk Till Dawn in 1996, George Clooney has averaged two movies per year. I have seen all but three of them, and 15 of 25 in the theater. He just kept on making quality films, one after the other, rarely falling into genre roles, usually modestly ignoring his good looks, and seeking out challenging material. Here are links to my Clooney reviews in this blog, with some superlatives:

Cute & Funny: Fantastic Mr. Fox
Worst Coen Brothers movie: Burn After Reading
Best acting: Michael Clayton
Heartless Genre Exercise: The Good German
Gruesome & Depressing Champion: Syriana
History Repeats Award: Good Night, and Good Luck.
I Don't Understand The Plot: Ocean's Twelve
Sexiest Costar: Intolerable Cruelty
Scariest: Solaris
Fun Shaggy-Dog directing debut: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
Least Sexy Costar: Ocean's Eleven
Most Special Effects: The Perfect Storm
Gruesome & Depressing, 2nd Place: Three Kings
I don't remember him in this movie: The Thin Red Line
Most Conventional Role: One Fine Day

I have also seen (on home video) Leatherheads, Ocean's Thirteen, Welcome to Collinwood, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Out of Sight, Batman & Robin, and From Dusk Till Dawn. I have not seen The Men Who Stare at Goats, Up in the Air, or The Peacemaker (1997).

Favorite Clooney movie (tie): O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Out of Sight, two movies I missed in theaters.
Least favorite Clooney movie: Ocean's Twelve

The Many Faces of Johnny Depp

2010-08-17T13:00:00.001-04:00

I've seen 12 of the 24 Depps pictured here. Click on the photo to go to the original post. (I've seen fourteen if you count Capt. Jack Sparrow three times). The Depps I've reviewed in this blog:

I know a lot of people might say it's super-gay for a guy to be a fan of Johnny Depp, but c'mon, how often does Depp trade in on his handsomeness? He hardly ever exploits his good looks in his movies. I better stop now, I'm sounding gayer and gayer as I keep typing.

The Other Guys

2010-08-11T16:58:00.077-04:00

As a grand experiment in first-time parenting, and for the first time since our last "rent a cabin in the woods" vacation (War of the Worlds in 2005), we went to the drive-in movies... this time, with a baby!

The Hollywood Drive-In, Wynantskill, NY is a family-owned business, with a real mom-and-pop feel. The program included a list of 101 things NOT to do at the drive in ("be sure to engage the parking brake so you don't roll backwards and crush the car behind you"). Modern drive-ins use a low-power FM transmitter to broadcast the audio: we were treated to music and goofy announcements from our own personal DJ!
I wish the movie was worth all the trouble. The Other Guys is a buddy comedy with Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. Speaking as a big fan of Will Ferrell in Old School and Anchorman, it's sad to see him devolve onscreen, from playing characters, to basically playing a pastiche of quirks and oddities. Ferrell's movies (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Blades of Glory) are constructed by shooting as much funny shit as possible, then editing together the best of the best. Whether the results made any sense has mattered less and less over the years, until now, Ferrell isn't playing a character anymore, he's just the sum of the funniest stuff they shot.

Mark Wahlberg takes his rogue detective from The Departed and torques up the stress and anger even further. It's awesome!
The plot was just complicated enough to be distracting.
The last movie of Ferrell's that I am glad I paid to see was Talladega Nights. We saw Blades of Glory on a Friday night when my wife was desparate for some work-week stress relief, and we only saw this movie because we wanted to try going to the drive-in again. My grade: C-PLUS.
In the end, we learned a lot about how to take the baby to the drive-in. The irony is, we have only gone to the drive-in twice in five years, so, at this rate, the boy will be going on six by the time we do it again!

I'm Still Thinking About INCEPTION

2010-07-29T17:20:00.001-04:00

Compare Leo DiCaprio in Inception and Robert Redford in The Sting:

His ulterior motive for bringing down The Mark (Cillian Murphy):

Cobb: Redemption for wife's death
Hooker: Revenge for partner's murder

He convinces The Mark to work with him to bring down a rival:

Cobb convinces Fischer (Cillian Murphy) to take down Browning (Tom Berenger)
Hooker convinces Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) to take down Gondorff (Paul Newman)

He keeps a secret from his associates which threatens whole sting:

Cobb's dead wife haunts his subconscious
Hooker haunted by vindictive cop

He refuses his share of the take:

Cobb promises his whole share to the Chemist, Yusuf
Hooker declines to accept his share: "I'd just blow it."

My favorite Inception joke so far, from Savage Chickens

Guys Movie Night: Inception

2010-07-27T14:34:00.000-04:00

Maybe it's because I barely made it to the theater in time.
Maybe because I was famished.
Maybe my full bladder is to blame.
The summer movie I had the highest hopes for did NOT blow me away.

Inception was really good, yes. A expertly crafted, thoughtful, intelligent movie which is about something. The rare non-sequel, non-comic-book, non-animated summer movie. But I did not receive the emotional whallop, or even the visceral "whoa" I was anticipating.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb, the leader of a team of con men. Instead of stealing money from their mark, they steal ideas by playing the mark within his own subconscious, where he's more vulnerable.

Entering an individual's dreams is a lot like The Matrix: you lie down, plug into a magic box, and BOOM, you're in the land of special effects. In order to escape, there's no pay phones to help you; you have to either die in the dream, or your sleeping body (back in the real world) needs a "kick" to jolt you awake.

Cobb risks everything on "one last score", the classic "it can't be done" scenario: their client needs them to plant an idea in the mark's mind, instead of stealing one. There are no secrets in the dreamer's mind: that's why the team is there. When you insert yourself into the land of the subconscious, your secrets come with you. Cobb's dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) haunts him and threatens them all.

The cast was excellent all around. I have a lot of respect for DiCaprio, even if I want him to shave off that 2-day goatee.

Ellen Page is the novice who discovers Cobb's secret and to whom the workings of the dream world is explained. She's a solid presence in this movie, and a purely dramatic, non-ironic role too.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Cobb's right-hand man, trying to keep Cobb rational. It's a pretty thankless role, until his showpiece weightless fight scenes.

Apparently, I have seen Tom Hardy in several movies (Marie Antoinette, Layer Cake, Star Trek: Nemesis) but I have no memory of him. I was riveted by his cocky, mouthy "forger", who skirts the edge of loyalty with his willful aggressiveness.

Director Christopher Nolan is a master at multi-layer, puzzle box movies which eschew linear narrative. Memento's plot is in reverse. The Prestige includes flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks. Inception's epic second half is the big con, with four adventures happening at once: The chemist is in a car chase, Cobb's right-hand man fights henchmen while floating down a zero-gee corridor, the Forger battles phantom soldiers on skis, and Cobb confronts his own obsessive guilt over his wife's death. These four adventures are happening in four nested dream-worlds, with each character asleep in the world "above". When the sleeper's environment is disturbed (rain, or music, or riding aboard an Econoline van during a gun battle), the sensory input bleeds into the dream. In Memento and The Prestige, the structure perfectly serves the themes of the movie, but with Inception, the structure is still supremely clever, organic, and perfectly executed, but doesn't purely enhance the theme of the film in the same way.
Nolan and his cast make a strong effort to make the doomed love story the core of the movie, but it just didn't resonate with me. Perhaps it's because we never see Cobb's and his wife truly in love, except for brief, shallow glimpses. Mal's "character" in the movie is a femme fatale, comprised of walking and talking memories from Cobb's mind, or flashbacks of their life together, which amounts to the same thing. We don't get much of a chance to see the real woman, and we see a lot of Cobb's guilt over her death incarnated in Mal, so it's hard to feel loss for a "woman" who scares the shit out of the audience repeatedly.
I was a little distracted by some references to the cast and their previous movies:

Cillian Murphy: Wears a bag on his head, like his Scarecrow
Ken Wantanabe: In one of the dreams, he's crushed by a beam falling from the ceiling, like Ras Al Guhl in Batman Begins
Marion Cotillard: Edith Piaf music is prominently featured; Cotillard won an Oscar playing Piaf
Leonardo DiCaprio: Washes up on a beach like Jack Dawson in Titanic 2: Never Let Me Go (okay I made that one up)

The first two I found actively distracting, the third might have bothered me if I had known it was Piaf on the soundtrack. Speaking of the soundtrack, Hans Zimmer's score (loud, brassy, single notes, sustained for 15 seconds each) was a little too reminiscent of his Dark Knight score.

And for those of you who are angry or stressed about the final scene of the movie, all I will say is, a note of ambiguity is necessary in a movie where we never know for sure what reality is, and if the movie had resolved with a purely decisive happy ending, it would have felt pat and fake.

Nolan has made two highly profitable Batman movies for Warner Bros. He's earned the right to make a complex, dark meditation on death, dreams, and the subconscious. It didn't hit me in the gut: I'm giving Inception a B-plus, but I may give the movie another chance. I paid $11.50 the first time, will I do it again? With Jon, Jack, Jeff, and Marc, at Regal Cinemas Stadium 13 (Screen 13)

Despicable Me

2010-07-16T14:27:00.007-04:00

A terrific comedy for adults and kids, Despicable Me is about a single dad balancing work and parenting, OR, if you're not interested in subtext, an awesome roller-coaster of physical gags, flying through space, and little "corn nuts" (see photo) whacking each other over the head.

The premise is an inversion of your typical children's tale: What if the orphaned children are adopted by the villain instead of the hero? Gru is an old-school Dr. Evil-style "blackmail the world" type villain who is struggling at work. Kind of like Steve Martin in Parenthood, he hasn't noticed that he's slowed down in his middle age: He can't keep up with the new generation of villains who are faster, younger, and hungrier for world domination. Gru travels from one nefarious scheme to another in a chrome-plated, rivet-hulled, rocket-powered hair dryer. Meanwhile, nipping at his heels, is Vector, an overeager puppy of a villain, stealing his thunder in a sleek, white & orange vibrator designed by Apple.
In order to pull off his latest heist, Gru adopts three orphan girls, who make an adorable wreck of his ambitions, while leading him to discover that it's better to be the hero to three little girls than the archenemy to the whole world. As a new dad (our son is eight months old) I got a little teary while Gru was saving the girls' lives during the classic "tightrope between two planes" bit. *I* want to be a hero to my son like Gru was to his daughters in that moment. Obviously I am not looking forward to my boy being abducted by my archenemy, so I can then save him (obviously!), but, I like to think I would walk out on the wing of my superjet to save his life.
My wife and I really appreciated the universality of the movie. I read somewhere that this was a mostly French production, and we noticed the anytime, anyplace nature of the movie. There were almost no pop culture jokes or topical humor. No "inside Hollywood" jokes. No "wisecracking" Borscht belt characters (see: the Donkey in Shrek; Timon in The Lion King.) Most of the fun comes from the "corn nuts" (thanks George): Gur's "Minions" are little yellow worker bees in overalls and goggles who populate Gru's evil underground lair.
The animation had that slick Pixar style, but unlike Pixar, a minimum of show-offy effects which Pixar compulsively includes. We also appreciated that the three orphans were characterized so well with ZERO maudlin saccharine backstory. I have not seen Toy Story 3 yet, but many Pixar movies have a soft spot of treacly tear-jerking moments; Despicable Me keeps he sob-inducing moments to a minimum.
I can't think of anything wrong with this movie- I found the disco dance-off at the end a little underwhelming? The theater was about half child-free couples and half kids; the kids loved the movie, and, speaking for the adults, I gotta give Despicable Me an "A" grade. It's not in the Hall of Fame or anything, but it does its job perfectly well, with laughs, style, grace, and humanity.
(Belmont Studio Cinema "in glorious 2D")

More Fun on Theater Marquees

2010-07-08T13:56:00.002-04:00

Spotted on a theater marquee this week:
GROWN UPS
ECLIPSE
THE KARATE KID

The marquee of the Lexington Flick last summer:
STAR TREK SEE IT AGAIN!
ANGELS & DEMONS
GOODBYE SOLO HOT DOGS

At the AMC Burlington in 2005:

BATMAN BEWITCHED

ALSO: The web site Unreality has a great photo gallery of movie marquee mischief.

Knight and Day

2010-07-03T14:01:00.001-04:00

A very well crafted action-comedy, perfectly designed to fufill expectations and satisfy crowds around the world, only a jaded cynic like me can admire Knight and Day. It's entertaining, sure, but it pains me to like a movie so clinically designed to make money.

Cruise is a rogue secret agent who takes Cameron Diaz with him on his adventures, when she becomes entangled in his "keep the MacGuffin away from the bad guys" mission. Diaz is great in these roles, being funny and mostly incompetent while preserving her self-respect.

The movie is full of taut, gripping, mildly innovative action sequences. Early scenes take place in Boston, and I found them convincing. I could not say where every scene was supposed to take place in the Hub, but it sure felt like Boston. The remainder of the movie takes place in Europe, (including a motorcycle chase amongst the Spanish bull run), which improves its overseas marketability.

The only aspect of the movie which does not work is the so-called "romantic" parts. I think we're supposed to believe that Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise's characters feel some kind of romantic, or at least sexual feelings for each other. The problem is, Tom Cruise's acting has become so stunted, that he exudes all the sexual energy of a washing machine or blender. He looks deeply into Diaz' eyes, and they stand close to each other, so I assume there's supposed to be lust of some kind occuring. There's even a squirm-inducing scene where we learn that Cruise changed Diaz out of her clothes and into a bikini while she was unconscious. He awkwardly excuses himself by pointing out that "I can reassemble a machine gun with my eyes closed, I can get you into a bikini without looking." Well, that's troubling for two reasons. One, isn't stripping a woman naked with your eyes closed still, erm, sexy? And second, Cruise is so non-sexual these days, I didn't believe for a second that he would actually enjoy it. As I pointed out in my review of Valkyrie last year, Cruise "has devolved to the point where the only emotion he's capable of is single-minded determined certainty." He's a technically perfect action hero, I could watch him run and jump all day, but when he tries to put on the lovey-dovey eyes, he's as convincing as a puppy.

By the end of the movie, they ride off into the sunset together, but it felt more like a brother and sister on a road trip than anything romantic.

It's easy to get distracted by the "faux-mance", but the rest of the movie was a fun night out. My grade = B-minus.

Guys Movie Night: Iron Man 2

2010-05-12T11:40:00.009-04:00

Great galloping guns! There's guys in metal suits all over this sequel, and there's weapons pointing in all directions. This sequel's ambitions for depth distract from the bang-bang, zoom-zoom, but the explosive battle at the end saves the movie. There's an epic quantity of ideas pulling in all directions, which leads to your typical bloated sequel. There were long stretches where the charm of Robert Downey Jr, and the quality repartee with Gwyneth Paltrow, distract us from the lack of shit blowing up. The good news is, this sequel's plethora of ideas are all good ones, and when the shit finally blows up, it blows up real good.
Mickey Rourke's Whiplash wreaks revenge and carnage on Tony Stark, Wrath Of Khan-style. His monologues make make zero sense, but I loved his Russian accent:

Ivan: If you could make God bleed, people will cease to believe in Him. There will be blood in the water, and the sharks will come.

(So is God bleeding in the ocean in this metaphor? Did God create lunch for a shark in his own image?)
Sam Rockwell is his usual hilarious self as a rival weapons manufacturer with a bad case of penis envy... wait, I mean "I want my own Iron Man suit envy".
Don Cheadle might be better than Terrence Howard as Stark's friend in the military. When he gets his own chrome-plated suit, he remakes his with tons of super-customizations, like those Honda Civics you see with a giant wing on the trunk lid: guns, guns, rockets, more guns, and don't forget the guns! I half expected to see a giant Chinese ideogram painted on the hood. Speaking of penis envy, Freud would love to analyze the scene where Stark and Rhodey wrestle each other in their matching metal super-suits.

"I need you to exit the Donut!"

Sam Jackson returns as the mysterious Nick Fury, bringing some much-needed lightness as the hard-as-nails, eye-patched, turtleneck-wearing leader of a secret superhero club which only comic book geeks care about.

George asks: Why do the women in these action movies always pose like this? (see Aeon Flux and Ultraviolet for more....)

Which brings us to Scarlett Johansson. She's the mysterious ass-kicker with the great body I've been seeing all over the Internet these last few months. She doesn't bring much humor to a part which otherwise consists of standing around with big lips. The ass kicking, when it finally arrives, is pretty fun, although the scene suffers from that cliche of kung-fu movies: why do the security guards arrive to fight her one at a time? Are they waiting in line for their turn?The five pitchers of margaritas were a great start to the evening, the only downsides were the obnoxious in-theater commercials, and the lack of good trailers. I'll give the movie a B-minus, and the evening an A!
TRIVIA: Jack wanted me to mention that the showgirls in the skimpy Iron Man costumes at the beginning of the film are credited as "The Ironettes".
MORE TRIVIA: The screenplay was written by Justin Theroux, whose only previous writing credit is for Tropic Thunder, but to me, he's best known as the evil, dreadlocked, breakdance-fighting D.J. in Zoolander. (AMC Boston Common screen 16 [DP], with George, Jack, Marc Pelletier, Harry, Jose, Murph, Ilan, and Phil)

The Best Actress Curse?

2010-04-21T12:02:00.003-04:00

With the back-to-back separations of Sandra Bullock and Kate Winslet from their husbands, one can't help but wonder if there's a Best Actress Curse plaguing the Oscars? When Halle Berry leveraged her Oscar win for Monster's Ball into roles in some of the worst movies of the decade, little did we know that Movie Karma would come around and spawn a curse! FUN FACT: The Rotten Tomatoes Freshness Rating for Monster's Ball is higher than the ratings for Gothika, Catwoman, and Perfect Stranger put together! Now it turns out, her curse has spilled over onto non-sellout Best Actress winners. The facts don't lie:

Halle Berry won Best Actress in 2002, marriage ended in 2005;
Charlize Theron won in 2004, marriage ended in 2010;
Hilary Swank won in 2000 and 2005, marriage ended in 2007;
Reese Witherspoon won in 2006, marriage ended in 2008;
Kate Winslet won in 2009, marriage ended later that year;
Sandra Bullock won in 2010, her marriage was over already, she just didn't know it yet.

It sounds pretty cold to be so cavalier about peoples' lives, but they don't read my blog, right?

Guys Movie Night: Clash of the Titans

2010-04-06T14:32:00.005-04:00

The new Clash of the Titans takes itself way too seriously. A stiff and humorless adventure fantasy which stuffs all the ideas from The Lord of the Rings trilogy into 118 minutes. There's some badass moments here and there, but I wanted more trashy fun. Grade: C+ !

MITIGATING FACTOR: The Guys of Guys Movie Night were eager to get out of the house after a long winter of serious, Oscar-worthy movies. A baker's dozen showed up for dinner (ribs) and a movie (beefcake ;-) We had a fun night out, which more than made up for the so-so movie.

The original Clash Of The Titans (1981) was one of a plethora of sci-fi/fantasy adventure movies attempting to cash in on the Star Wars phenomenon. The 1981 CotT was no special movie- so why remake it with such grim seriousness and import? Why not let the characters have fun, or at least ham it up a little? It doesn't help that Perseus is played by the wooden and humorless Sam Worthington (left holding the bag, see photo): he's an Aussie, just like Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson, and Heath Ledger, but those three all had a fun side that's missing in Sam.

Liam Neeson totally rocked a gaudy, glowing, chromed suit of armor, which would have fit in perfectly in the 1980 Flash Gordon movie. I kept expecting Queen music to play whenever he appeared onscreen. Neeson played Zeus with the same thick, lionine hair and beard as when he played Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia. See the image below and compare for yourself?

Ralph Fiennes is Hades, a misunderstood villain, with matted hair, ashen, cracked skin, speaking in a whisper, like a sick dog who's been sleeping in the basement behind the furnace. He looked silly floating in midair, POOFing from place to place like a coal-powered teleporter, but frankly, the movie needs all the silliness it can get.

The new CotT applies the Lord of the Rings template, and the comparisons are NOT flattering:

Rag-tag fellowship voyages across varied landscapes, filmed from a helicopter? Check.
Leader carries a special weapon which he dares not use? Check.
Porcelain-skinned beauty, struggling with her immortality, offering moral support, and possible romance? Check.
Two Hobbit-esque bumblers offering comic relief? Check.

After reading Ty Burr's scathing review in the Boston Globe last week, I still hoped for a trashy and kick-ass experience, but I wanted to avoid the retro-fitted pseudo-3D. It took some digging online to discover that the Boston megaplexes were only showing CotT in 3D, and charging $15.50 per ticket! Meanwhile on planet Earth, the Somerville Theater is showing CotT in 2D for $8.50. Whatta bargain, AND they serve beer! As the organizer of Guys Movie Night, I successfully persuaded the Gang of 12 to pay less for a beer-fueled moviegoing experience.

NEW EUPHEMISM for URINATION: "I gotta go release the Kraken!"

(Clash of the Titans, in glorious 2D, for $8.50, at the Somerville Theater, with Jon, Adam, Angus, Jack, Marc, George, Jose, Jeff, Ilan, Brian, Alex, and John.)

The Backlash Has Begun

2010-04-06T11:38:00.004-04:00

Seen on the marquee of the Belmont Studio Cinema, this morning:

JOHNNY DEPP IN
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
PRESENTED IN 2D

The Ghost Writer

2010-03-20T15:02:00.001-04:00

An intelligent, gripping, adult thriller. I was on the edge of my seat all the way through. Mystery and tension lurk around every corner, in every black car, in every evasive interview, in every telling pause, in every unexplained interaction. We talked about what we saw all the way home, and I was still deconstructing it days later.I really admire a movie with a "European" sensibility, which is code for "assumes you're paying attention", "does not explain everything" and "Ewan McGregor's bare bum" (I think he's contractually obliged to show his butt?)

Alfred Hitchcock would love this movie- it plays with your mind, wraps you around their finger, and is completely devoid of sentimentality. I give it an A grade.

Rated PG-13 for language (mostly British-style swearing), brief nudity/sexuality (Ewan's butt), some violence (hardly any violence at all), and a drug reference (a picture of a doobie!).

PREVIEW NOTE: The trailer for the romance Letters To Juliet is the latest preview to encapsulate the entire movie. There's no need to actually pay to see this film once you've viewed the trailer. The only part missing is the last 30 seconds of the film where the guy finally comes to his senses and tells the girl he loves her, presumably in front of a pretty Italian backdrop, or in front of a crowd who spontaneously applaud.

(Cinema De Lux, Legacy Place, Dedham)

Crazy Heart

2010-02-24T12:05:00.004-05:00

A fine no-frills character study elevated by an excellent performance by Jeff Bridges. Bad Blake was once a successful and popular old-school country-western star, but many years have come and gone. A lifetime of alcoholism and four failed marriages has taken its toll when we meet him. Blake hits the bottom of the barrel around the time he vomits into a barrel behind a bowling alley- in the middle of a song he's supposed to be singing. Maggie Gyllenhaal is a the single mom who is charmed by his "crazy heart" and makes the mistake of falling in love. The plot is simple, the movie itself is laid-back and unpretentious. Bridges is excellent and unafraid to look pitiful- there are plenty of cringing moments, including his drunken attempts at retaining his dignity. The music is good, in fact, if it were better, or more "showy", it would distract. It's simple pleasures are an asset. The third act rehabilitation and pat ending are a little easy, but a movie as modest and honest as this can be forgiven. (Belmont Studio Cinema, with Sarah "Pickles" Hershberger)

The Wolfman

2010-02-13T09:47:00.005-05:00

What could be more romantic for a Valentine's date night than The Wolfman? My wife and I weren't going to see Garry Marshall's Valentine's Day even before Lisa Schwarzbaum's F for "failing" grade in Entertainment Weekly, or 18% freshness rating from Rotten Tomatoes. We wanted something escapist, entertaining, and predictable. The Wolfman delivered on all three counts. (NOTE: The Wolfman got a B grade from EW and 33% from Rotten Tomatoes. the Stub Hubby gives it a B-minus.

The Wolfman 2010 is a aggresively old-school monster movie. The only concessions to the 21st century are the graphic evisceration of the werewolf's victims (oh, so THAT's what "rip your lungs out" looks like!) and some CGI effects mixed in with Rick Baker's makeup magic. Otherwise, it's all foggy English moors, decrepit estates, kerosene lamps, Indian manservants, and Gypsy travelers camping in the woods.

Benicio Del Toro, the swarthiest Oscar winner ever, is a peripatetic stage actor who returns to the aforementioned foggy English mansion/homestead when his brother is eaten by the Wolf. In residence amongst the kerosene lamps, playing his grand piano and reading his lines off cue cards, is a classically English Oscar winner who can be hired for ANY movie, Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins is Del Toro's father, reprising his Van Helsing role with less scenery chewing than I would have expected (and hoped for!) Hugo Weaving is fantastic as a sharp Scotland Yard detective who's willing to believe anything. The special effects vary wildly in quality from neat CGI effects to "a guy in a wolf suit" practical effects. I was surprised to discover the boring, indifferent score was by Danny Elfman? It didn't seem like his work at all.

There's no new ground broken here, and no surprises at all, but the drama and thrills are satisfying, if familiar.

The Book Of Eli

2010-01-28T23:22:00.003-05:00

A fatally flawed Western set in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Denzel Washington is Eli, the avenging angel/Christian pilgrim, pulled into a battle of faith versus greed when he crosses paths with small town despot "Carnegie" (Gary Oldman).

The premise, sadly similar to The Road Warrior, holds a sliver of promise: it's been 30 years since "the war" destroyed civilization. The survivors blamed The Bible for the war, and sought to destroy every copy on Earth. As a result, the populace born since the war is mostly illiterate, and the knowledge of Christianity has been forgotten. Eli carries a leather-bound King James Bible in his rucksack, reads it every night, and has faith in it. Carnegie, on the other hand, sees its power to control the desperate hearts and minds of the godless survivors across the desert wasteland of America.

The idea of a society where God has been forgotten, a hardscrabble subsistence culture where survival comes before humanity, could have been exploited to make a dramatic, powerful film. Instead, the Hughes Brothers (From Hell, Menace II Society) miss those opportunities, thanks to poor style choices and cliche'd plot elements.

One of the main thematic elements is the burning power of the sun. The war, 30 years earlier, "punched a hole in the sky", blinding many survivors with "the flash", and forcing the rest to wear sunglasses at all times to avoid being blinded. This ties in nicely with the idea that the godless survivors are "blind" to the knowledge of The Lord, but it creates a crippling dramatic challenge. The entire cast wears sunglasses all the time, forcing Academy Award winner Denzel Washington, wearing oversized opaque lenses, to do all his acting without his most emotive organs? Mila Kunis (Solara), whose talent surprised and impressed me in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, only gets two scenes without her Top Gun aviator shades. At least most of Gary Oldman's scenes take place indoors, but he dons ridiculous Truman Capote Wayfarers for the gun battles on Main Street.

Denzel's Eli is a man of few words. Even once he is forced to allow Solara to tag along on his journey, he speaks hardly at all about the world before the war, about the word of the Lord, or about his faith. What's the point in having a Christian alone in the wilderness if he refuses to spread The Word?

The most tedious element has to be Carnegie's henchmen. Once again, Oldman is playing the clever villain who is forced to order around his moronic henchmen. I love Gary Oldman, but he's played this exact part much better in The Professional and The Fifth Element.

The ending includes a clever plot twist, several geographic impossibilities, a physiologically unlikely scenario, and Malcolm McDowell with long white hair and a stringy mustache. I am not going to bother to explain how this movie goes downhill sideways in the last 10 minutes, because I beg you to avoid this movie anyway.

My favorite part of the movie was the score. The original music is credited to newcomers Atticus Ross, Leopold Ross, and Claudia Sarne. The score was a mix of droning atonal doom, reminiscent of The Shining, and quasi-Nine Inch Nails instrumentals, but on the whole they offered a evocative counterpoint to the barren landscapes of deserts, craters, and sepia-toned hopelessness.

I saw this with Marc, Jack, Jeff, and José- Jack talked me down from a C+ grade ("that's just below average!") to a D+ grade. Someone suggested that I was grading on a curve, but if that were true, it would have flunked completely as the worst movie I saw in a theater in the last year. (Regal Fenway 13, screen 2)

All-Time Ticket Sales Leaders

2010-01-27T15:26:00.003-05:00

Box office grosses are a poor metric of a movie's success, even when comparing current box office results to movies released a year or two ago. When comparing a current film against all-time blockbusters, the comparison is meaningless.

This issue has come to a head with the success of Avatar. By any measure, it's a successful and wildly popular movie, but it's pointless to gauge Avatar's popularity based on box office gross, when the average price paid for a ticket is so much higher than any movie in history. Even box office leaders from 2009 or 2008 did not include huge numbers of IMAX and 3D sales.

The only fair metric to judge a movie's popularity in a historical context is plain 'ol tickets sold. Box Office Mojo has a nice interactive table ranking all-time domestic box office, by dollars, and by tickets sold. By that measure, Avatar, at 76 million tickets sold, is at #26 all-time. Be sure to read the Chart Notes at right- 15 of the 25 movies ahead of Avatar on the list have benefited from multiple theatrical releases- a common practice for blockbusters pre-1980, also Disney movies, and movies by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

2010-01-18T13:43:00.006-05:00

A truly adorable and yet surprisingly sober family movie. Mr. Fox, a middle-aged father and husband, suffers a mid-life crisis. Instead of buying a convertible or having an affair, he returns to his youthful daredevil ways. Mr. Fox begins poaching poultry and piercing the pride of the local farmers. The three evil farmers swear vengeance against Mr. Fox. Forced from their homes, Mr. Fox, his family, and their wild subterranean neighbors are backed into a corner (literally) and must fight back.

Writer/director Wes Anderson, who drives me crazy with his fetishistic obsession with props and costumes, daddy issues, and overall twee-ness, has found a forum where these weaknesses are turned into strengths, or at least neutralized: animation.

His live-action movies, including The Royal Tenembaums and The Life Aquatic, are now much less insufferable, because now I will pretend I am watching stop-motion animated puppets, instead of Bill Murray and Owen Wilson and their stilted dialog.

Emily, Henry, and I saw TFMF on the Monday after MLK Day with a theater-ful of parents, babies, and young children, at the Arlington Capitol Theater's "Baby Friendly Movie" 1 p.m. matinee. I was pleasantly surprised that the young children were completely riveted by, and mostly silent during, the movie. Some babies cried occasionally, but not to the point where I could not follow the film. I was expecting to be entirely distracted. Instead, I had a great time.

It's Complicated

2010-01-07T11:33:00.005-05:00

A tribute to the beauty of older women, and a surprisingly thoughtful meditation on marriage, wrapped up in a glossy romantic comedy. Meryl Streep is lovely and silly as a empty-nester who is seduced into an ill-advised love affair with her ex-husband, Alec Baldwin. Baldwin charms Streep... and every woman in the audience too, but his charm is almost predatory in its insistence.
Streep and Baldwin were married for 18 years, divorced, and have barely spoken for the past 10 years. Most divorced couples in movies do nothing but bicker and insult each other. The novelty of this movie's premise is that it skips that part of their lives and picks up the thread long after that chapter is over.

Here's how they looked when their characters got married in the early 1980s

They reunite by chance, spontaneously share a drunken evening together, which leads to a drunken "hookup" (that's what the young folks are calling it these days.) Streep is seduced by Baldwin's charm and desire, but, as with many divorces, there is also the element of "unfinished business" between them. They fall back together easily --they were married in the first place for a reason-- but is this reunion an honest reappraisal of their relationship, or is it more complicated? I really appreciated the thoughtfulness with which the movie addresses the lingering feelings of a divorced couple.
I was expecting It's Complicated to be too long- 120 minutes is an epic length for a romantic comedy - but it's not as "too long" as it could have been. It's the shortest movie yet from writer/director Nancy Meyers:

It's Complicated = 120 minutes
The Holiday = 137 minutes
Something's Gotta Give = 128 minutes
What Women Want = 127 minutes
The Parent Trap = 127 minutes

Besides a slightly soggy third act, I am also fed up with the sheer wealth of families in Nancy Meyers movies- It's Complicated takes place in the exclusive domain of millionaires. Baldwin is a lawyer who drives a $100,000 Porsche 911. Streep owns her own bakery / restaurant (picture Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa as the inspiration), lives in a plush homestead on what appears to be a plantation. She immodestly complains about her modest kitchen (which is already bigger than some apartments I've lived in) and has grand plans to build a whole new wing on her house. Perhaps the intent is to create a aspirational fantasy world, but in today's wintry economic climate, this upper-upper-class world left me cold.
I had a great time watching this movie with my friend Adam...and nearly every woman we know! They all laughed at nearly everything Alec Baldwin said. What a charmer! Also, John Krasinski was very good as their daughter's fiance- hardly a "Jim" moment in the whole movie. (AMC Church St, Harvard Square Screen #1, with Amy, Adam, Mandy, Pickles, Karen, Penny, Julie, Mary Beth, and many more!)

Top 25: 2000-2009

2010-01-01T15:07:00.000-05:00

Here's my Top 25 movies of the last decade. This list includes the movies that were the most entertaining, the movies I like to watch over and over, the movies with the biggest emotional whallop. Most of the decade retrospective lists I've read in magazines, newspapers, and online this winter have given little respect to comedies and action movies. Critics are too desperate for respect to admit there's value in quality "popcorn" entertainment. Yours truly, however, won't fool anyone by putting some obvious Oscar-winning "respected" movies on this list!

2000

Chicken Run
Gladiator
High Fidelity
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Wonder Boys

2001

Shrek • I think we have all forgotten how irreverent and funny the first Shrek movie was before it's power was diluted by sequels and a flood of merchandising.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001, 02, 03) Yes, I counted them as one big movie.

2003

A Mighty Wind
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse Of The Black Pearl
Finding Nemo
Master & Commander: Far Side of the World

2004

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Shaun of the Dead
The Incredibles

2005

The Forty-Year-Old Virgin

2006

Children Of Men
The Departed
The Prestige

2007

The Bourne Ultimatum
Hot Fuzz
Ratatouille
There Will Be Blood

2008

The Dark Knight
WALL•E

Avatar

2009-12-20T18:46:00.003-05:00

An exciting, broad-stroke epic, perfectly realized by James Cameron. The aliens and their future world are perfectly presented without artifice. All the dreams of alien worlds from the entire history of science fiction were finally realized. Who knew that James Cameron cared about our innate connection and dependence on sustaining Mother Gaia? Every tree is sacred? As my friend Brian pointed out, Cameron's misanthropy was securely in place, in the part of the imperialist strip-mining corporation.

I give this movie an A-minus. What was wrong with it? The villain was completely one-dimensional, with no motivation except simple war-mongering. All the characters could have used more detail and emotion. Also, the plot is completely cribbed from Disney's screenplay for Pocahontas, so I never for one moment wondered what would happen next.

It is not necessary to see Avatar in 3D. It was only occasionally distracting. If you have not yet seen a movie with this new 3D technology, picture and entire movie presented like a ViewMaster, and that's the sensation you get. (In REALD 3D at Cinema Du Lux, Dedham)

124: The Hank Scorpio Dictionary of Soul

2009-12-01T15:28:00.000-05:00

"These Days" R.E.M. Live at the Olympia. Have you ever continued to follow your favorite band long after their creative peak, then looked back in regret, wishing you hadn't bought their last four albums? I used to be a big fan of R.E.M. I have all their CDs up through Reveal (2001). Not long after that, I looked back at the previous decade, and wished I had given up the R.E.M. habit after Automatic for the People in 1992. If anyone is interested in buying used copies of Monster (1994), New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996), Up (1998), and Reveal, let me know...
Soap on a Rope" Chickenfoot. A unabashedly retro hard rock supergroup: Joe Satriani, Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony, and Chad Smith. I got this single for free on Amazon.
"I Hate My Generation" Cracker
"Camera One" Josh Joplin Group sounds remarkably like R.E.M.
"(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To" Weezer. I have never been a particular fan of Weezer, but this song is a lot of fun.
"Big Yellow Taxi" by Joni Mitchell has very similar guitar rhythm to the Weezer song, above.
"Carol Brown" by Flight of the Conchords turns "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover" back on the guy. I love Jemaine talking back to his ex-girlfriend backing chorus.
"Already Gone" might be my favorite Eagles song.
"I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)" (Extended Club Mix) Hall & Oates. I am a collector of 12-inch dance remixes, specifically remixes of 1980s rock and pop songs (non-disco.) I have never heard of a group re-releasing their remixes as part of catalog reissues, but I found some Hall & Oates remixes re-released on Amazon.
"Mississippi" Sheryl Crow. Thanks to RDM for including this song on a mix CD he gave me. Bob Dylan's original version is one of the first songs my son heard on our iPod the day after he was born.
"I'm Looking Through You" The Beatles. I have liked singing to my son since Day One (literally.) I sang this song to him on Day One. I don't know how I chose this song, but there you go.
"Rock Me On The Water" Jackson Browne
"In Your Room" The Bangles. In November 2009, I saw one of my favorite musicians, Matthew Sweet, live onstage in Arlington MA (!!) as part of his "Under The Covers" side project with ex-Bangle Susannah Hoffs. One of the final performances of the night was an acoustic version of "In Your Room". NOTE: Susannah and I share a birthday!
"Planet Claire" The B-52's. I saw a cheer group dance to this song in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2009.
"Poker Face" Lady Gaga
"We Don't Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)" Tina Turner. I also used to sing the chorus of this song to my newborn son. Who knows why.
"Free Will" Rush
"Maggie May" Susannah Hoffs & Matthew Sweet
"Singalong Junk" Paul McCartney. Another singalong to my son.

LEFT: Me and my son, 2009.
RIGHT: Paul and Mary McCartney, 1970.

The Invention of Lying

2009-10-26T18:23:00.003-04:00

A surreal parable for atheism disguised as a Liar Liar style comedy, The Invention of Lying was co-written and -directed by Ricky Gervais. We are huge Ricky Gervais fans, so we we eager to see this "in a world without lying" movie before it disappeared from theaters.

In this world, everyone always tells the truth, so everyone always trusts everything you say. Gervais's character's life is circliing the drain when he invents lying out of pure desparation: since Gervais considers using his new skill to exploit his fellow man for money, sex, and social status. The movie hits the heart (and made me weepy) when Gervais consoles his mother on her deathbed. There is no God and no Heaven in this world, so Gervais "makes up" a higher power to save her from eternal oblivion. Quickly word spreads of his "man in the sky who watches everything you do" and he becomes a prophet for the God he just invented.

There's also a romantic triangle between Gervais, Jennifer Garner, and Rob Lowe. Garner refuses to date Gervais because he is unsuitable genetically: apparently love is not blind in this world? It's a thin excuse to keep their characters apart. Only because Garner is so sweet and wholesome can we stand to listen to her complain about how fat their kids would be if they mated.

I tried to treat this as a parable and not an alternate universe. The concept of this entire world without lying was taken too literally in some places. For example, Gervais is happy to mine comedy from his short, fat, and ugliness, so there's too many scenes of people making insulting observations about each other. Also, in this world, fiction does not exist so all entertainment is in the form of historical documentaries, which does not yield too many laughs. One of many plot holes: they never address the idea that people could say things that are untrue because they are misinformed, drunk, crazy, etc.

To sum up: some interesting ideas about atheism, religion, and God, but the script needed a fresh perspective. (Entertainment Cinemas Fresh Pond)

The Remastered Beatles Buying Guide

2009-09-16T16:27:00.000-04:00

The Beatles have finally remastered and re-released their entire catalog, 22 years after their original release on CD. In 1987-88, the complete Beatles consisted of

123 No Man Can Say

2009-09-01T17:31:00.000-04:00

This mix is not particularly inspired- it's overloaded with random songs pulled from CDs and LPs I had recently bought at yard sales.

"Mais Que Nada" Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 • One of those instrumentals I have heard a thousand times and never knew the name. I heard it in the movie Joe Versus The Volcano, so I was able to find the title in the end credits and VOILA here we are. Also known as Music From A Baseball Pitching Change.
"Too Many Dicks [On the Dancefloor]" Flight of the Conchords • I am glad to hear that FOTC is not going to continue for a third season on HBO. I loved season 1, but season 2 was nowhere near as good. This song was a highlight!
"White Lines [Don't Do It]" Duran Duran feat. Grandmaster Flash • Craig Ferguson once lip-synched this song (with a puppet chorus) as the cold open of The Late Late Show, I shit you not.
"We'll Be Together" • Sting
"I DoWanna Know" REO Speedwagon • I had not heard this song in 20 years when I found the LP at Antiques USA in Arundel, ME, for $2. Not exactly a rock 'n' roll classic, I had seen the video for it as a teenager, on Boston's UHF video channel V-66. For some strange reason, this completely ordinary rock song's catchy chorus stuck with me into the 21st century. Listening to it again for the first time in two decades was like watching a video of a long lost dream. Very trippy.
"Sonny Feeling" • Wilco
"Bittersweet" • Hoodoo Gurus
"Baby You're A Rich Man" [mono mix, 2009 remaster] • The Beatles
"Sugar Magnolia" Matthew Sweet & Susannah Hoffs • A Grateful Dead cover from their second disc of classic rock cover songs, Under The Covers Vol 2. I went to see the dynamic duo play an acoustic set, with my friends George and Mandy, in November.
"Las Vegas Turnaround (The Stewardess Song)" Hall & Oates • From Hall & Oates early seventies era.
"It Hasn't Happened Yet" John Hiatt • From John Hiatt's pre-fame era.
"Slowly [oh so slowly]" • Conor Oberst & The Mystic Valley Band
"Rock'n Me '76 Slow" Steve Miller Band • An outtake from the Fly Like An Eagle sessions, it's a slow acoustic version of the rock classic.
"Across The River" • Bruce Hornsby & The Range
"Don't Change" • INXS

"Girl Of 100 Lists" The Go-Gos • I was inspired to include this song after reading a 1983 Rolling Stone cover story about the Go-Gos.
"Time Stand Still" The Hooters • Only after I bought this song on iTunes did I realize why it sounded so good- it's a unintentional remake of their own song "Satellite". Oh well.
"Rollin' And Tumblin'" Canned Heat • I first heard this blues standard covered on Eric Clapton Unplugged.
"Hey Ya" Booker T. • The organist/leader of Booker T. & The MG's covers the Outkast song on the organ!