response 73 of 112:

Aug 11 18:16 UTC 2003

Saw American Wedding last night--pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
Laughed my ass off, and spent about the same amount of time hiding my face
because I couldn't bear to watch.

response 75 of 112:

Aug 13 16:37 UTC 2003

Caught Hulk at the dollar theater last Sat.  Not much plot to speak 
of.  Just Hulkster bouncing 'round the country with the military in 
persuit.  Eye candy, nothing more.

response 77 of 112:

Aug 14 16:27 UTC 2003

Watched "Emma" on video. Quite enjoyble. Though they did rush Emma's 
feelings for Knightley toward the end.

response 79 of 112:

Aug 14 17:31 UTC 2003

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.

response 81 of 112:

Aug 18 17:50 UTC 2003

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.

response 83 of 112:

Aug 19 17:02 UTC 2003

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. 

response 85 of 112:

Aug 20 12:37 UTC 2003

Out of ten.

response 87 of 112:

Aug 23 04:46 UTC 2003

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.

response 89 of 112:

Aug 25 18:03 UTC 2003

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.

response 91 of 112:

Aug 25 20:08 UTC 2003

Something like that would fit Costner's role. 

response 93 of 112:

Aug 25 20:46 UTC 2003

  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..

response 95 of 112:

Aug 26 06:07 UTC 2003

Is he still alive?