Taking a cue from Mark’s recent movie round-up, here are a few I’ve seen recently in the theater and on DVD:

21: Somewhat entertaining but silly, and probably very loose, adaptation of a group of MIT students’ exploits counting cards in Vegas. Loses points for totally marginal female characters, zero character development overall, bad Boston accents, poaching music from Ocean’s Eleven. Academia/fanboy objection: no faculty club or alumni dinner is as nice as the one Kevin Spacey (playing an MIT prof.) attends…at least not where I’ve been.

Forbidden Kingdom: Jet Li! Jackie Chan! Together…in a totally sub-par, saccharine sweet martial arts/coming of age movie. Rips liberally from numerous sources, most egregiously from Lord of the Rings, but less gloriously from The Karate Kid. Somewhat cool combat sequences unable to compensate for terrible plot, in which a martial-arts obsessed kid from “Boston” is magically teleported to “China,” where he is instructed in kung fu, and in life, by a drunken immortal (Chan) and an anti-social monk (Li), who is actually the avatar of a monkey god (also Li). Metafictional potential of a martial arts movie taking place in an alternate universe and hundreds of years before the martial arts movies beloved by one character (the kid) utterly squandered, and reduced to Blade-style admonitions – “monkey fist? That’s kid’s stuff!” Or something like that.

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First of all, it’s important to know that this full-length album is available for free on the internet – Trent Reznor is giving it away, which I imagine alters the calculus as to whether to acquire it or not.  Come to think of it, the fact that The Slip exists (for the time being) as a free download only calls into question its status as a full-length album at all, and also renders interesting and sort of quaint Reznor’s decision to adhere to a form that developed under technology-induced limitations on length that are now overcome, and market-driven constraints on “out there” content to which he is no longer exposed – at least within the limited sphere of this one album.

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Mark’s recent flurry of posting has really energized me to actually write some of the things I’ve been meaning to write about forever. First up is a totally sublime song from Antony and the Johnsons called “The Lake.” The song itself is amazing (lyrics from a poem of the same name by Poe here), but on top of that the video (not sure if this is official or what) has this Disney’s Robin Hood thing that I frankly find irresistable. Alas, no Alan-a-Dale, but I’ll take what I can get.

more below the cut.

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Among other things, joining blockbuster, has increased the number of new movies I’ve seen. I wonder what’s been going on at movie night in my absence. Anyway, here are my thoughts on some of them.

Anime

Voices of a Distant Star. What can I say but that I’ve been into anime recently. It started with Miyazaki then kind of branched out. I saw a youtube preview of a different movie by the Voices of a Distant Star guy and thought it looked kind of charming. I can’t not recommend this movie enough. Really pretentious. Imagine the most stereotypical anime fanboy in a suit. Perhaps 5cm per sec will be better.

Howl’s Moving Castle. The most recent (available anyway) from Miyazaki. Has all the trappings of a Miyazaki movie but the pseudo-Napoleonic thing is hard to deal with. And the characters are very Final Fantasy. All of the Miyazaki movies released by Disney have pretty good dubs, although for this one I don’t think a British accent works for the main character. Also, don’t expect too much from the special features on the Miyazaki DVDs. Most of them are two discs, but the second disc is usually devoted to storyboards. One of them (Spirited Away I believe) has a documentary with a pretty good scene of Miyazaki cooking 9 bricks of instant noodles.

Akira. One of the classics. The setting, mood, and motorcycle make this picture a joy to watch, although the advanced age children I find to be creepy. Anyway, I think watching a movie like this is part of being well read in 2008.

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. Everybody talks about the music with this one. I have to say, I don’t get it. I mean, I like the anime itself, but the music seems to me to be kind of cheesy.

Other Movies I’ve Seen

The Orphanage. Riding on the coattails of Pan’s Labyrinth. A passable horror movie but feels very Cold Case.

The Bucket List. Came out on DVD recently, kept it in mind as a backup in case I couldn’t find anything else. It’s nice to see old actors playing in movies that are about age related issues. Kind of predictable.

Be Kind Rewind. Probably my favorite rental recently. For once, Jack Black actually stars in an ok movie.

Purple Butterfly. So called sixth generation of chinese filmmakers. Sort of unwatchable. Zhang Ziyi is not compelling.

Curse of the Golden Flower. Ornamentation city. Probably something lost in translation with this one.

The Other Boleyn Girl. I’ve never been into Natalie Portman, but I do think Scarlett Johansson is hot. I don’t know what to say about this one. Watch only for ScarJo’s earth motherliness. Where’s rick wakeman?????

Silk. A nilotic for today. It’s weird watching Michael Pitt in anything except Bully, especially here.

Post Mortem

Talking to the clerks at bb is often more entertaining than watching the movies.

Hilarious

Indy 4 abridged script

I had the pleasure today of seeing Indy 4. I must say…this is not what I was expecting, although in retrospect maybe I should have. Considering what Lucas did with the Star Wars series it should not have been a surprise. I read somewhere that Spielberg was putting this movie off because he couldn’t find the right story. As many of the reviews have pointed out, it’s sort of a lame stargate rip off. It’s hard to imagine that they couldn’t have thought of anything else in all that time. Maybe I’m just so out of touch. Is it too much to have wanted Lucas and Spielberg to take their apparent cynicism about the endeavor and put it on the screen instead of in their pockets. Given how old Harrison Ford is, and the times and everything, I thought I was going to see something darker in tone. I mean, not nihilistic, but a chance to explore some darker terrain. I wanted to see an old Indiana Jones, doing battle not only with thugs but with the ravages of time, disease, and old age. I wanted to see Indy struggling in a world that’s moved on without him. I don’t know, maybe I’m expecting too much. But, I mean, it is sorry indeed, this sort of weird holding pattern of hollywood where nothing can be good because everything has to suck because that’s the way things are. Even if we don’t expect movies to changes our lives does that also preclude taking a risk.

I guess you have to see this in light of everything that has happened in movies since 1989. That’s ultimately the problem with Indy 4. It’s like they took all the wrong lessons about what happened with movies in the late 90s and 00s and applied them. For example, there’s a depressingly bad scene in National Treasure 2 where Nicolas Cage has this like historical argument with this random kid that concludes with the kid walking away and Nicolas Cage saying something like, “what’s going on with the education system in America?” What indeed. The subtext is supposed to be, “nothing at all,” history buffs are a dime a dozen in this great nation. However, the substance of their argument is all lame conspiracy theory, novelty bullshit. It’s sad to see that creep into Indiana Jones. I suppose the historical credentials of the series were never very good to begin with, but one should expect things to improve with age not get worse. In the previous movies, Indy would have never stood around lecturing people with corny scholarship. But that must be Lucas’ doing. He likes his characters to expound on the dumbest things. This is really where they missed the greatest opportunity. The nature of the character allows them to access basically anything in human history. Why make something up? They could have gone anywhere, and it could have been edifying. How about something about China for instance, explore new territory for the franchise and tap into some pressing issues of the world today? If you want to have Soviets as the enemies why not something Russian? Indiana Jones is as much a part of the cultural fabric as anything else, why can’t it be a little edifying.

The problems extend to the whole look of the movie. Too many sound stages and too much crap cg. One of the great things about the first star wars movie was that the desert actually looked like a place. Here, everything looks like a dimly lit hotel lobby. I don’t think I’m alone in not caring if something looks ‘awesome’ as long as its interesting.

I think one of the best things I read about this movie was that you are rooting for it to be good, but it lets you down. There are precious few movies left where we can honestly say that you want them to be good. I remember, one fateful movie night, watching Coronado and thinking during one chase scene, ‘oh, they’re trying to place non sequitur arguing between the love interests just like Indiana Jones.’ Well, I guess the circle really is now complete because I had the same reaction to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

i understand that this will be a great blow to my credibility, but i have to admit to digging this coldplay song pretty hard. viva la vida: