response 337 of 342:

Mar 20 18:00 UTC 2006

Rented "Grizzly Man". Quite a bit of food for thought about what 
constitutes rational and irrational behavior. Absolutely astonishing 
footage of grizzly bears in their natural habitat at "work" and play. No 
one else to my knowledge had lived for a couple of months for a dozen 
consecutive years in the midst of grizzly bear habitat and "played" with 
the bears. I would charactarize Timothy Treadwell as an manic romantic 
with an irrational lack of fear for his own safety. As you all probably 
know he and a companion were killed and eaten at the end of his 13th 
expedition among the bears, but by a bear that he did not know and did not 
know him. He also made what might have been the fatal mistake, which was 
to have with him a companion that did not have his apparently intuitive if 
weird sense of how the bears reacted to the presence of humans.

The photography is astonishing. The quality is amazing on the big screen 
from using a hand-size video camera (make not identified). He would have 
had to bring enough batteries with him for a dozen or more hours of 
filming on each expedition - he left over 100 hours of video recordings - 
but these technical aspects are not explained.

The movie was assembled from Treadwell's recordings and later interviews 
with Treadwell's friends and relatives by Werner Herzog. Herzog is a 
reknown director, producer, actor and editor - and in this case also 
narrator and interviewer - of over fifty fiction and documentary movies.

The DVD has has a brief documentary on the creation and recording of the 
musical accompaniment. Performance music turns out to not be one of 
Herzog's talents, but his role in the creation of the music was still as 
an astute and critical director.

response 339 of 342:

Mar 20 20:53 UTC 2006

My son bought "The Incredibles" yesterday and I watched it with him.  I 
still think it was a clever movie concept, but it's not a movie I enjoy 
watching again and again.

response 341 of 342:

Mar 20 23:51 UTC 2006

MIDNIGHT COWBOY-- Just got the newly released two disc deluxe edition 
of this, one of my favorite movies.  This is the only X-rated movie to 
win the Oscar for Best Picture.  Jon Voigt is the title character, a 
drifter from Texas named Joe Buck who comes to NYC to be the "midnight 
cowboy", a cowboy gigolo.  He fails miserably in his attempts at this 
new career and is nearly swallowed up by a city in which he has no clue 
how to survive, until he meets streetwise Ratso Rizzo (Dustin 
Hoffman).  The two form a relationship, with each providing the other 
what he lacks.  The movie got rated X at the time because of its frank 
depictions of homosexuality and prostitution.  It was re-rated R some 
years later when it was re-released and appeared tame compared to 
movies that came out since.  "Midnight Cowboy" is a highly influential 
movie that has been copied or emulated many times since.  There's the 
famous scene where Ratso Rizzo (Hoffman) attempts to cross a street and 
nearly gets hit by a cab and he screams "hey, I'm walkin here! I'm 
walkin' here!"  But at its essence its a movie about two loners who 
find a companionship in each other that they never found with anyone 
else.  The scene at the end of the movie, where they are on the bus to 
Florida, and the sick Ratso Rizzo dies, and Joe Buck (Voigt) puts his 
arm around his dead friend hugging him tightly as the bus rolls on down 
the highway, is heartbreaking.  The extras on this new dvd are 
excellent, particularly a documentary featuring hoffman and voigt 
talking about the characters and what the movie meant to 
them.  "Midnight Cowboy" is a great movie and this new dvd is an 
excellent addition to anyone's movie collection.