An archive of my old LiveJournal
The bad news: MirrorMask is only opening in selected theaters on September 30.
The good news: Those theaters include Edwards University. (I’m not sure where the Landmark Nuart Theater is, but it’s the only one in LA.)
According to Neil Gaiman, the amount of business it does during the first week will determine whether it gets a wider release.
So, who wants to go see MirrorMask?
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?
Finally got out to see The Kingdom of Heaven at one of the local second-run theaters. Once upon a time it was Edwards Woodbridge. Never a flagship theater, it was getting pretty run down by the time they sold it off. I think the last movie I saw there was Star Wars: Episode I three or four months after it came out.
The real shock was that the theater was in great shape. Certainly much better shape than last time, back when the carpet was ragged and stained, some of the seats were ready to fall apart, etc. One of the new owners (there’ve been at least three, I think) put in new carpet, new tiles, new paint, fixed the seats… and is still offering $2 matinees. Even the film was in decent shape. The focus was a bit off on the right side of the screen, but it wasn’t nearly as scratched as I’d expect it to be after 2 1/2 months.
Re-Watch Episode I: Check
Re-Watch Episode II: Check
Watch Clone Wars: Check
Pre-order tickets for Episode III: Check
I’m kind of annoyed with myself for actually being excited about this movie.
Roads Gone Wild: a traffic engineer discovers that, in some circumstances, if you design the road right, you can actually make it safer by removing signs, lane lines, curbs and the like. The comments at Photomatt.netare interesting as well.
The History of Mathematical Symbols. Some of them are more recent than you might think.
Top 10 cheesiest movie lines—though they should probably be renamed the top 10 high profile cheesy movie lines. I think “I’m just the cook” in Under Siege (or was it the sequel?) is at least the equal of “No, I’m a postman” in cheese level. And once you get into the realm of B movies, there’s a wealth of cheese to be found.
Ursula Le Guin doesn’t like what Skiffy did to the Earthsea books. She really doesn’t like it She really, really doesn’t like it. She really, really, really doesn’t like it. And she’s not alone.
Daniel Handler, however, seems okay with the screen adaptation of his books.
The Hollywood blockbuster formula:
The end result: tons of substandard movies that nobody really likes, but that make plenty of money. More to the point, there’s not much incentive to make anything better
I had an idea on how to deal with the problem, based partly on mine and alenxa’s viewing habits: Unless you’re reasonably certain the movie will be worth seeing, wait until the second week it’s out. Aside from saving you from ghastly lines, it gives you a chance to pick up the word-of-mouth. If it turns out to be lousy, you save yourself 2 hours (more like three when you throw in parking) and 10 bucks. More importantly, if enough people wait for week 2, films will need to keep second-week ticket sales, which should encourage studios to make films that will have first-weekend people saying, “I loved it! It was better than Cats!” and recommend it to all their second-weekend friends.
It’ll never happen, but it’s at least an idea.
There was a story on NPR today about the evolution of the term blockbuster from simply meaning a movie that’s very successful to meaning a particular type of movie (the overblown summer action flick). It got me thinking about the increased number of movie theaters in the area, and then is it really that big an increase, or is it just in line with population growth?
Then I realized: nearly every movie theater I’ve been to in the past couple of years, I remember being new. And all the ones I remember going to as a kid are gone or, if they’re lucky, converted into art house cinema.
In fact, the only one I remember going to regularly that’s still first-run is Edwards Hutton Center, and I have a vague feeling it might have been new at the time. At least, I think it was still there the last time I drove past it. With so many other theaters around, I’m not sure I’ve actually been there since high school.
Big Newport has escaped the encroachment of the new, mainly because it’s, well, the biggest screen this side of the Rockies (according to legend, anyway). And I’ve probably been to University and South Coast Village more often since they became art houses than I did “back in the day.”
This morning alenxa asked me if I’d posted anything on comic book time (the effect by which Superman and Lois Lane are roughly the same age now as they were in 1938). I’d actually started writing about it a while back, but never finished it.
Around lunchtime I took a look at the Drafts folder on my keychain drive, and I found it — a lot shorter than I remembered, and a lot more recent. I also found an epic I had written ages ago based on another of our conversations — one wondering about the dearth of sci-fi art films. This thing is several pages long, deals with defining sci-fi, fantasy, and related genres, and doesn’t even get to the art film issue, and predates our group blog by several months. In fact, it’s old enough that the first line starts off, “My girlfriend and I were having a conversation about movies….”
There was a footnote about popular derision of science fiction vs. popular consumption of it that I thought was worth posting on its own, although since it dealt with top movie grosses, it needed a bit of updating. This piece of weblog history can now be seen at Viewing the Impossible.
I dashed off some thoughts on several other half-finished pieces (including the time issue), as well as a new one I’d been thinking about while drifting off to sleep last night (or maybe drifting off to consciousness this morning). I figure on finishing and posting them over the next few days. Maybe I’ll start breaking up the epic and post that too. With a new opening line, of course!
Here’s an interesting theory: What if it didn’t take months of impact-caused “nuclear” winter to kill off all the dinosaurs? A new report suggests that the impact itself would have released so much heat, it would have flash-burned all life on land within hours. Only those animals protected by, say, the ocean (fish), or rivers (crocodiles), or underground burrows (small mammals) would have survived.
It doesn’t explain the death of aquatic dinosaurs, or (to my mind) the survival of birds, but it’s at least interesting. (As with all fly-in-the-face-of-accepted-theory theories, some skepticism is required. But hey, people used to think that the idea of asteroid-impact extinction was far-fetched.)
It’s a scary idea. Most disaster epics are at least in part about what comes after the disaster. Who lives, what they have to face, how they go on. From Noah to the Day After Tomorrow. Human beings can survive a nuclear winter. Not in as large numbers, not necessarily with civilization intact, but it’s at least possible. If you’ve got only minutes to hours, you’d better have Jor-el and a rocket – or a hell of a lot of bomb shelters – because the world is going bye-bye.
Oh, if you have a chance (and can turn on the sound), check out the DAT link: NPR did a review, but they decided it would be more fun to send their science correspondent than a movie critic!