I went to see Bill Maher’s Religulous on Friday night. The SF Chronicle reviewed it and didn’t like it, characterizing it as completely unfair and one-sided. After reading that review, I thought I might not like it, myself, since I tend to prefer fair and reasonable debate/argument.
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These are some of the best YouTube clips I’ve ever seen… I’m not sure what it is that makes them quite so captivating.
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I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight this evening. I had mixed feelings about Batman Begins—I loved the first half of it and hated the second half. The Dark Knight was different: the parts I hated and the parts I loved were mixed together throughout the film.
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I’m usually pleased when I stumble across questions that it seems can only be answered by Freebase or a lot of work—even though I don’t see Freebase as being primarily for casual searching/browsing in the way that Wikipedia is, it’s always nice when I come up with a casual question (one that might come up in conversation, say) that suits the site very well.
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I just can’t resist linking to Glenn Beck lauding The Dark Knight as a film vindicating Bush’s policies. Somehow I missed Andrew Klavan doing the same in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago… and reading it now simply makes my head hurt.
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I haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet. I intend to see it, although my feeling about Batman Begins was that the first half was excellent and the second half execrable. I hope the second movie doesn’t continue the downward trend. I also have my doubts about the presence of Harvey Dent—I’ve never found that character compelling or believable, even in The Dark Knight Returns.
“I don’t believe in Harvey Dent” is a pretty good critique/rant about the recent superhero movies, including The Dark Knight, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man. John Pistelli also covers The Dark Knight, and Hellboy II (which I also intend to see).
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The trailer for the film adaptation of Watchmen is out. I’ve always been sceptical of what Hollywood would do to it, figuring they’d manage to mangle the masterpiece that is the graphic novel.
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I recently came across this rather cute trans-species-romance from Korea, and thought it was quite well done, with an animation style I found striking.
Why have there been so few good ones? I noticed this a while back, and having discussed the matter with some friends, it appears to be the case that the first decade of this millennium is really bad for cinematic science fiction.
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This was on BoingBoing, but I wanted to post a link to it anyway, partly because it’s definitely worth listening to the audio of Joe Frank’s original monologue, which was plagiarized for the beginning of Scorcese’s After Hours.
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Following on from a BoingBoing post about a 52-second David Lynch film, I found a number of other interesting Lynch-related video online.
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I found this essay on the relationship between Fight Club and Calvin and Hobbes to be completely hilarious:
“Fight Club: The Return of Hobbes”.
I’ve never seen Johnny Mnemonic, but I’ve heard bad things. Terrible things. It is renowned as an absolutely disgraceful adaptation of a beloved short story. That being said, I suspect it has nothing on the Sci-Fi Channel rendering of Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld Saga.
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Okay, so it’s not quite “thinking”, but it’s $150K/year to accumulate ‘interesting people’ and summaries of the zeitgeist for Hollywood producer Brian Grazer.
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When I went to see Michael Mann’s 1981 directorial debut, Thief, this evening, I was struck by the two trailers accompanying it, the original trailers for Robocop and The Terminator. (There will be spoilers for those movies in what follows, so if you somehow haven’t seen those movies yet, you probably shouldn’t read on.)
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I went to see this tonight (yes, when I should have been editing). It was excellent, and while I can’t claim that it had a definitive Coen Brothers mark (because I haven’t yet worked out what that is), it definitely stood out as “different” somehow.
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(This is a continuation from yesterday’s post about what Episode II’s plot should have been.)
The Republic is at war, and has been for two years as Anakin Skywalker, commanding the forces of the Republic, has forced Dooku’s Separatists to the outer fringes and destroyed many of their power bases. The Republic is on a war footing, and Senator Palpatine has consolidated his power, with Padmé Amidala’s moderate faction increadingly isolated in their attempts to curtail him.
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(I had this idea for a better plot immediately after seeing Episode III, but have been prompted to write it down by the Star Wars Blog-a-Thon that’s marking the 30th anniversary of the first film.)
I’m willing to cede Episode I to Lucas. After all, he wanted to make one “for the kids”, right? So sure. He can have Episode I. Including the pod race, the wacky-implausible Anakin fighter pilot scene, and Jar-Jar. Yes, even Jar-Jar. Despite much of the awfulness there, Lucas still did a good job of introducing/reintroducting characters who made for a compelling story.
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As reported by The Register, The UK Ministry of Defence is running a satellite network that will be used to control unmanned MQ-9 Reaper drones… and the name of the network? Skynet. Presumably killer androids who like phased plasma rifles in the forty-watt range will be added to the network soon…
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I saw this on Sunday night and it was excellent. I highly recommend it. (The full post contains spoilers, so don’t read this yet if you’re going to go see it.)
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So the good guys in this movie are the ones who kill off newborn males if they’re “defective” in any way? Hmm…
Despite being a Frank Miller fan, I’ve never read the 300 comic. It just didn’t seem as if it would have enough to hold my interest (plot is rather important to me). Seeing the movie version hasn’t changed my mind.
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I went to see David Lynch’s Inland Empire at the Castro Theatre tonight, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
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