Weekend of Movies

alenxa and I don’t go to movies very often. Usually we just don’t get around to it until whatever film it was isn’t in theaters anymore (unless it’s something one or both of us really wants to see). Sometime last year we started making a list of movies we’d missed, movies one of us wanted to show the other, and movies we wanted to see again. We watched a few, and then the list got buried on my desk, and then I had to clean off my desk and it got buried in a pile on the floor in front of a shelf.

After we rented Underworld a few weeks ago (a film which takes itself waaay too seriously, and which gets misfiled in Horror instead of Action because it has vampires and werewolves in it), I tracked down the list and we started working through it. We don’t watch enough to justify paying for Netflix (though I keep meaning to check out their selection, which would be the tipping point), but we can get a 2-for-1 deal at Blockbuster if we rent early in the week. It makes it easier to rent movies that we know are going to be MSTK fodder in a couple of decades, since we can get them free with a better film.

Anyway, to this weekend. On Thursday, I went with wayens to see a showing of Ghostbusters in an actual movie theater. It really holds up. The jokes are still funny, the story still works, and even the effects hold up pretty well. (The main exception would be the stop-motion version of the terror dogs, which is probably a combination of compositing and lack of motion blur). One thing I noticed was that the story itself is treated 100% seriously. The humor is in the characters, the dialogue, the attitude. The Stay-Puft Marshmallow man, for instance, is incredibly silly — but because there’s a logical in-sroty reason for it, and the characters treat it as a real threat, it works. Wayne was remarking about how tightly the movie is put together. It goes from their breakthrough, to their first case, to the main plot, with montages serving to fill in the gaps.

Saturday I finally watched From Hell while Katie was blockading. Since it’s been over a year since I read the book, and I knew to expect a historical drama/horror rather than a documentary, I actually thought it was a fairly decent Jack the Ripper film (if there is such a thing). Unfortunately they ripped out some of the key parts of the book — all the symbolism in London’s architecture, for instance, wouldn’t have fit onscreen anyway, but I rather liked the flash-forwards to the 20th century during his psychotic break after the final murder. One of the main points was that this version of Jack believed he was ushering in the future. They kept the line, but left out everything that supported it.

Then last night we watched Ben-Hur. I hadn’t seen it before, but Katie had, and she recommended it especially for the chariot race. Now I knew that the pod race in The Phantom Menace was full of homages to this, but I hadn’t realized it was practically a blow-by-blow remake… even down to the music!

Finally, today we went out to the nearby second-run theater to watch Madagascar. The last time we went there, we were surprised that the theater was in better condition than it had been back when it showed first-run films. They were charging something like $2 for matinees and $4 for evenings. There were maybe 10-20 people in the theater with us. Now, they’ve lowered their prices. Matinees are only $1. I have no idea how they plan on staying in business…but you know what, the theater was almost full. Lower prices + more customers = more revenue (if the coefficients are right). Fun movie, nothing I’d want to rush out and see again, though I was amazed how much of the music was chosen as in-jokes. Who in their target audience is going to recognize Chariots of Fire?

So, has anyone seen The Brothers Grimm? Is it any good?