34 new of 112 responses total.
Yup, I've watched that. I'd read the book earlier, but somehow hadn't made the connection. It's only when I watched the movie "Emma" that the parallels became much clearer.
"The Third Man", from the library's small-but-growing DVD collection. Pretty cool, although not the most interesting movie from that era I've seen. Mostly I wanted to be able to comment intelligently on the "Pinky & the Brain" episode which spoofed this movie. :)
Leslie and I did a double-feature Saturday, so we could stay cool while helping DTE out by not running our air conditioning. WHALE RIDER was possibly even better the second time I saw it; certainly the picture and sound were better at the Q16. A MIGHTY WIND was funny, not as funny as SPINAL TAP, and very much focused on The Great Folk Scare of 40 years ago.
THe Time Machine (2002): Better than I thought it would, and at 93 minutes it was easily watchable. I'm certainly glad they didn't try to stretch it out to 2 hours, though. The storyline changes were actually OK, too. Some things were hokey, others cool - I especially liked the library computer character. The fake tribal pop music during the Eloi scenes just about gagged me.
We went to see the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen at the cheap theater yesterday. It was pretty good, given that the critics had trashed it nearly as badly as Gigli, and I was surprised that I had a good time. The storyline was more coherent than I'd expected, and the characterizations were fun, wiht lots of one-liners and interesting/unexpected interactions that got missed in the reviews I'd seen (at rottentomatoes.com, I think I saw a hundred, and maybe 20 gave it grudgingly good marks). I would give it a six, I think.
Six out of what?
Out of ten.
Ten what?
SEABISCUIT-- saw this tonight and was pretty disappointed. The acting is wonderful and the cinematography on the horse racing scenes is awesome, but the screenplay left out a lot of what happened and took the edge off the three main characters and "disneyfied" them (made them more wholesome than they really were) This is a case where you are better off reading the book than seeing the movie. In the book, a great book "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand, you see that the three main characters-- Seabiscuit's owner, trainer and jockey, are dark lonely figures, corrupted by life, who are each in their own way redeemed for their past failures in their lives by the success of the underdog horse they come to love. The movie makes the three characters all wholesome and sweet. You see Seabiscuit's owner, Jeff Bridges, meeting and romancing his new young Mexican wife. You aren't told that the woman is his grown son's sister in law. In fact you don't even see the grown son, because the film's screenwriter I guess wants you to think the jockey, is the surrogate son. They cleaned up the character. And the jockey is played as young and wide-eyed innocent by Tobey McGuire, and yet if you read the book you read that the jockey was a hard edged man beaten down by life who looked older, a hard drinker and womanizer who looked older than fifty when he was thirty. Again they cleaned up the character. There's a key scene in the movie where the trainer, well played by Chris Cooper, tells the owner (Jeff Bridges) that Seabiscuit lost a big race because it turns out the jockey was blind in one eye and never told them. And Jeff Bridges, all big hearted and sweet, says he doesn't care and people need to be able to overcome their handicaps, or something like that. Didn't happen. If you read the book, it clearly says that Seabiscuit's jockey kept the fact of his being blind in one eye a secret all his life, because it would have ended his career. Horse racing is a business and Seabiscuit's owner would have fired the jockey on the spot if he'd found out he was blind in one eye. But this is the Disneyfied version of the Seabiscuit tale, where the characters are wholesome and nobody keeps secrets and everybody's reedemable and there are no skeletons in anybody's closets. The story of Seabiscuit is amazing, its a lot more real and moving than what they show in the movie. Save the money on "Seabiscuit" the movie, and use it to buy Laura Hillenbrand's book that its based on instead.
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OPEN RANGE - I don't think I've intentionally gone to see an oater in a theatre in years, usually getting my fill from the box. But I will say the lack of ad interruptions, and the vastness of the scenic panoramas, do add to the theatre experience. Otherwise, this is a pretty standard one of its genre, with the twist that the usual good guys are the bad guys and vica versa. While overall I enjoyed it for what it was, I did get the feeling that they filmed several endings and then used bits of all of them. The female lead was also kind of wooden, but the villains were adequately snarly and villainous. The moral I got from the tale was, always befriend the man with the dog.
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Something like that would fit Costner's role.
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Make it a double-feature with a film where Arlond Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Stephen Seagal struggle to get in touch with theirinner feelings and you'll have a truly dreadful evening..
Perhaps a movie where Lee Marvin kills them all?
Is he still alive?
(blustering) Well, Lee's a pretty tough guy...
Lee Marvin: 1924-1987
I thoroughly enjoyed "Pirates of the Caribbean." And I understood the dialogue and the plot better the second time around. My friend and I were the only people left in the theatre when the (lengthy) credits finished and the movie continued on for a minute or so.
I like when that happens.
I meant to mention in #88, re OPEN RANGE, that there were only five (5) at the 9:45 p.m. showing last Saturday at Madstone. An attendant said it was because everyone was in SEABISCUIT. I still thought it was pretty strange.
resp:99 Me, too. I feel rewarded for my quirk.
I saw "Finding Nemo" last week. I really liked it. Ellen DeGeneres is hysterical. I've also watched more rented movies than I can begin to list. Here's ones that stick out: "Bowling for Columbine" - Kind of all over the place, but I loved it. "Solaris" - The only thing remarkable about this movie was Clooney's ass. And I assure you, for $4, there wasn't enough of it. "Big Eden" - Great movie about relationships.
regarding Solaris, I paid full price to see it at the theater when it came out. I left soon after the ass sighting, and tried to console myself on money wasted.
Being who I am, I didn't even find *that* aspect of "Solaris" worthwhile. The movie was a major disappointment from a director I normally like.
I didn't even bother to see that version - the Russian version would be pretty hard to top.
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I got the new deluxe DVD last week of Sergio Leone's classic, "Once Upon A Time in America" The best thing about the DVD, although it has plenty of extras, is that it has Leone's original European cut of the movie, which is nearly four hours long. This is the cut that never showed in the U.S. The U.S. distributors thought it was too long, they fired Leone, and hired an outside editor to slash the movie to under 2 1/2 hours. In the process, the studio's editor re-arranged all the scenes in chronological order and removed the script's "flashback" basis. This basically ruined the movie. The uncut version would have won the Academy Award that year, but the cut up version screwed up the order of the scenes, took out key scenes, and left the whole thing a mess. Leone refused to have anything to do with the version that played in the U.S. (this is all detailed in a terrific docuemntary on the second disc) Leone was able to re-edit and release a longer version, over three hours, where he restored his intended sequencing. But even then he wasn't allowed to simply release the entire movie in the U.S. The European version, Leone's original version-- nearly fours-- with all scenes restored, was never released theatrically in the U.S. That is the version on this DVD. The flashback sequencing is crucial to this story. Robert DeNiro is a jewish gangster, who is now much older and is reliving his past, and coming to terms with his past, and the loss of his friendship with his est friend, played by James Woods. It really is a great movie, one of the best of its genre ever in fact. Well worth having in DVD in its letterboxed, original form. Has a great musical score too.
I finally got my hands on "chalte Chalte" a typical bollywood movie. I had heard that it was about husband-wife friction, but the first half dealt with the soppy romance before the couple gets married (this wouldn't be Bollywood if it weren't for the romance and song-dance routines) When it actually came to the married life of the couple, that really hit home. I'm not married but living with my fiance, and I see a lot of us in that couple. The arguments were real, the fights were the kind of fights we had. The make-ups were like us. I think that part of the movie was well made. Then it ended in the typical soppy Hindi-movie style. Pity.
Skip "Cold Creek Manor". Solid cast (Dennis Quaid, Sharon Stone,
Juliet Lewis, Christopher Plummer) doesn't even begin to save this
plodding, predictable, paint-by-numbers thriller. Director Mike
Figgis has made some fine, risk-taking movies ("Leaving Las Vegas",
"Timecode"), but in this one he risks nothing except possibly his
professional reputation. What a disappointment.
Saw a sneak preview of Underworld last week. It was a nice idea, but I was very disappointed with the last half hour or hour of the movie--found myself rooting against the good guy, for the bad guy. I was glad it was a free sneak preview and I hadn't paid actual money to see it. Go see this only if you have a stalkeresque relationship to Kate Beckinsale and want to spend two hours watching her run around in formfitted leather and rubber suits (admittedly, she looks very nice in them). Last night I went to the campus showing of "Nowhere in Africa"--a German film shot in Afrika, in German and Swahili with English subtitles. I was very glad that they subtitled rather than dubbing--it added a great deal to listen, for my non-German-speaking friend as well as myself. Excellent movie. Go see it if you get the chance.
I'm considering seeing "Underworld" just for the eye candy and to find out what had White Wolf in such a huff... but then I'm a Camarilla member and a music video junkie. *shrug* This might be the movie I consider a waste of my money-- who knows. (that's if I find a babysitter)
I was totally rooting for the bad guy (Lucien) at the end.
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