Willow ,'Beneath You'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
OK. I just read the first Temeraire book. My word, does that have Peter Jackson and Weta written all over it. I wasn't sure at first, but the climatic battle scene is just so PJ.
And with Napoleonic uniforms and brightly colored dragons, it should be easy to tell who's who.
Speaking of - EW interviews Peter Jackson about many things including The Hobbit and Temeraire - here.
The Matrix: Revolutions slow-motion rave music videosequence was just on. How is it that Budweiser hasn't bought the footage from this to air as a commercial?
The whole scene? That takes some dedication by the network to devote that much of their daily programming to one thing.
They did split it up with a commercial break in the middle.
So, Children of Men is one of the best films of the year. Not only does it quickly abolish the emotional distance between the audience and the film's world and characters but it also has one of the most overwhelming, nerve-shredding sequences I've ever seen and one of the most graceful.
I adore Cuarón and several the film's actors (in particular Julianne Moore and Peter Mullan, though their performances here aren't that memorable) so I was expecting to like it but I was expecting to like it in more of an entertaining Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Az... Harry Potter 3 way than a rapturous Y tu mamá también way. And it's definitel the rapturous kind of like I'm feeling.
In places, the sound design and editing are top-notch. I say 'in places' because the absence of both is, in places, much more striking.
I saw the Last Kiss last night. It was an odd combination of really true, intimate and well-acted scenes and lame plot contrivances. Big problem for me was the younger chick was patently uninteresting--they needed someone like Faith to make that attraction work.
Blythe Danner, looking absolutely beautiful and exactly her own age, and Tom Wilkinson were amazing.
I saw "Flyboys" yesterday. A movie that cliched should not take that long to end.
My favorite podcast is Out of The Past: Investigating Film Noir.
Two film professors doing deep analytical commentary on their movie of the bi-week. They get stronger as they go on. Unfortunately for this board's interest their coverage of Batman Begins is one of their least interesting. (They navigate between classic noir and more recent examples, but their best work is on classic noir.) The Bladerunner commentary was excellent They're best on classic noir, though, like Sunset Boulevard and D.O.A. Lots of good research material on Rififi.
I saw All the King's Men on Saturday. Overall, I liked it, but it is flawed, too many subplots, too much "telling, not showing," and my head really hurt at the end, what with all the anvils falling. Sean Penn was great, and I liked his use of his body to show his charactor becoming drunk with power, or so it seemed to me. It's beautifully shot. I did have some quarrels with historical inaccuracy, inaccurate even for the 1950s, in which this version is set. I haven't read Robert Penn Warren's book, nor seen the 1949 version, so I can't compare.