TV And Films

The shows and movies I like (or don’t).

Life or Something Like It

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Candice and I had been talking for about a week now about trying to take some time out of our schedules to wander down and see a movie, and finally got the chance last night. It was Candice’s turn to pick, so we ended up watching Life or Something Like It, with Angelina Jolie.

While it wasn’t anything amazing, it was certainly a very cute little romantic comedy, and I think it might be the best role I’ve seen Jolie in (and a very welcome change from the dreck that was Tomb Raider). An enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes, at the very least.

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Blade II

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Candice and I went out to see Blade II this afternoon. Candice didn’t think to highly of it (she likened it to a “Popeye on crack” film — just substitute Blade for Popeye and blood for spinach — and called it the “silliest vampire movie [she’d] seen in years”), and while I can’t really refute her impressions, I had a lot of fun with it. One of the few sequels that I think comes close to matching the original.

The original Blade was one of the better vampire/action films (as if that were a genre in itself) I’d seen in a while, and Blade II does a fairly good job of continuing the storyline from where the first movie ended in a plausible way, and taking the action quotient up a notch. Icky new bad guys, fun fight scenes, and Wesley Snipes being a badass — you can’t really go too wrong with that!

Good bits: the new baddies, the ‘Reapers’, are all sorts of cool. Similar to vampires, but faster, stronger and — most importantly — much ickier, I was more impressed with how they turned out than I expected. The trailers were savvy enough not to show off the Reapers’ most defining characteristic (a wonderful thing, as it made for an actual moment of surprise when it was first revealed, and too many trailers these days are less previews than they are visual ‘Cliffs Notes‘ for the films themselves…but I digress), and the effects for that were extremely well done. Once I got over the ‘ick’ factor and paid more attention to the work, I was impressed at how seamlessly they were integrated into everything else, and how they fit the characters themselves.

Kudos also to the writers — the same writers as the first Blade, which I think helped — who were able to preserve continuity for the characters, the plotline, and the tone of the film from the first one. Kris Kristofferson had what could have been a thankless task of returning as second fiddle to Snipes in his role as Whistler, but they were able to give him a role that actually had more meat to it than I had expected it to after hearing that he was coming back for the second film.

For the most part the fight scenes were a lot of fun, though they did at times succumb to the two pet peeves I have about modern action filmmaking — hyperactive over-editing, and the ‘stutter shutter’ effect. There were also a couple instances where key characters (Blade and his opponent) were entirely computer-generated, which didn’t quite look real. Things in this area are definitely improving over time, but it’s still not to a point where it can fool the human eye.

Overall, Blade II was pretty much exactly what I was looking for — a fun romp, with fun special effects and action. Easily worth my time and money to go see.

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

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First off — wow.

I thought I’d read The Lord of the Rings a long time ago. Now that I’ve just finished reading it, I’m not sure if I ever actually had or not. It may well be that I’d read The Hobbit a long time ago and over the years thought that I’d read the entire LotR series. It could also be that I’d seen the animated version and assumed over the years that I’d also read the book. Now I’m not as sure, as far too much of what I read was entirely unfamiliar to me.

Either way, though, I’ve now read it — and if I hadn’t read it before, it’s a shame it took me this long. It really is as good as people say it is. Not that I ever really doubted that, however, it’s far different to have so many people hold it up as a masterpiece of fantasy, and to be able to actually form that opinion for yourself.

There’s a lot more information and reviews of LotR available on the ‘net (a quick Google search for “tolkien lord of the rings -movie” turns up around 125,000 hits) that are very likely to be much more well-written and in-depth than this little bit of babble is, so I’ll just stick with what I’ve got.

I was promped to pick it up and (re?-)read it after watching Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (which I apparently didn’t post any comments on, though I did mention it a couple times beforehand…). I’ve definitely got a lot more respect for Peter Jackson‘s ability to translate the books to the screen — and I’m really jonesing to see the rest now! Just seven more months until The Two Towers comes out, and nineteen until The Return of the King. Going to be a long wait, that’s for sure….

Bye-bye ‘Enterprise!’

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I’ve been watching the new Star Trek show, Enterprise, off and on for a while now. I haven’t caught every new episode, but those I have, I posted my thoughts on. It doesn’t look like I’ll be doing this anymore, though.

Wednesday evening I turned on my TV to watch the show, and as it turns out, my reception here at the new apartment is actually worse than it was at my old one. So, watching the broadcast isn’t an option, and there’s no way I’m going to pay for cable access just so I can watch one show. At first I was kind of disappointed by this, but something else has happened this week that made me realize that I probably wasn’t going to miss Enterprise all that much.

This Tuesday marked the release of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation in a very nice DVD box set. I picked up my copy on Wednesday on my way home from work, and when I found that I wasn’t going to be able to watch Enterprise, I started watching TNG episodes.

The thing is — I’d forgotten just how good this show really was! Sure, it was their first season, everyone was still getting the hang of their characters, and the special effects were fairly horrid (and that’s not just hindsight talking — I remember being extremely unimpressed with the effects in “Justice” at the time it first aired) — but even with all that, each episode I (re-)watch drives home more and more just how good TNG was…and just how much Enterprise pales in comparison.

Watching the first season of TNG now is actually much like watching it for the first time. I watched TNG almost religiously when it first came on the air — it first aired during my sophomore year in high school, and for quite a while it became a ritual for my group of friends to gather at someone’s house (usually Tammy’s, though I think Royce, myself, and some of the others hosted the gathering from time to time) and watch whatever the newest episode was. However, by the time I graduated in ’91 and moved out to live on my own for the first time, television was less and less of a priority, and I ended up missing the majority of the last few seasons of TNG. In the ensuing years I’ve caught the occasional episode of one Trek show or another in reruns, but those times have been fairly few and far between. I remember bits and pieces of the shows I’ve seen, but much has faded in the mists of memory over the years.

In essence, then, it’s very easy for me to compare watching the first season of Enterprise fresh out of the bottle to watching the first season of TNG the same way — and I’ve gotta say, ENT just doesn’t compare. Up until now, I’ve been somewhat of an apologist for ENT, doing my best to give it a chance, and one of the most common arguments when someone says that ENT just isn’t that good of a show is that it’s still their first season. Often someone will offer up, “remember just how much better TNG was after a few seasons, and how shaky their first season was?” Well sure, it was better after as it went on (which makes me look forward even more to those seasons being released on DVD later this year) — but that argument was a lot easier for me to accept when I hadn’t actually seen first-season TNG since 1987. The episodes and dilemmas presented therein are much more interesting, the characters are more engaging — about the only point that I can see that first-season ENT really has over first-season TNG is the special effects, and much of that is the simple fact that it’s 15 years later (side note — 15 years later? Ugh…I’m feeling old again!) and modern-day F/X technology is that much better.

Perhaps ENT will mature as it goes along, and perhaps it will grow into being a truly worthwhile addition to the Star Trek universe — it’d be nice to see that happen, as I still think that some of the new ideas and directions they’re exploring in ENT could be very interesting (the new take on the Vulcans, for example). However, at the moment — I can’t say I’m going to really miss not being able to watch it anymore.

Eugenics wars

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I’m trying to figure out what surprises me more — that someone in the UK is writing an article that appears to be seriously promoting eugenics in the near future, or that in the resulting MeFi discussion nobody thought to mention the Eugenics Wars of the early 1990’s, leading to Khan Noonien Singh‘s bid for world power in 1992, and his departure with a band of followers in 1996. Or maybe I’m just a big Star Trek geek.

iMacs in the movies

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Most of the computers in movies for several years have been Macintoshes, maybe because the Mac is the only computer that doesn’t look like every other computer and therefore benefits from product placement. But this is the first movie in which an entire iMac commercial runs on TV in the background of a shot.

How’s that for random trivia? Thanks to Roger Ebert’s review of Showtime for this little tidbit.

A.I. (Absolutely Incredible)

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I really do think that AI is an astounding film. Luckily enough, I’m not the only one. If you’ve got some time to kill and have seen the film, it’s really worth checking out a couple discussions going on over at the HTF, there’s some amazingly intelligent analyses being posted.

Atlantis, AI, Jay and Silent Bob, Say Anything

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While my DVD purchases are nowhere near what they used to be now that I don’t have the extra income and employee discount from Suncoast, I do still occasionally pick one up here and there. I’ve picked up four over the past month (see? Four in a month!) — here’s the scoop….

Atlantis: The Lost Empire: Disney’s most recent animated flick. I thought this one was very under-appreciated when it came out in the theaters, which was a shame — though not entirely surprising. It’s Disney’s first PG-rated animated film since The Black Cauldron, and one of their few non-musicals. It’s also got a much more adult-oriented sense of humor running through it, which I very much enjoyed. Well worth seeing, though — I really like the fact that Disney has finally decided to stray from the standard formula that they held to for so long, and I hope that the fact that A:TLE didn’t perform as well as it could have in the box office doesn’t scare them away from experimenting in the future.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: Hey — it’s Kevin Smith! Sure, there’s not exactly much in the way of a plot, and many of the jokes won’t connect with people who haven’t seen the rest of his films. Being a Kevin Smith fan, though, I think it’s pretty funny. If nothing else, the news bulletin warning people to “stay away from the C.L.I.T” (Campaign for the Liberation of Itinerant Tree-dwellers), and watching Ben Affleck and Matt Damon rip on themselves by selling out to make Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season are worth watching. At least…I think so.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence: The single best film Spielberg has done, one of the best movies of last year (if not the best), and certiainly one of the few must-see “thinking person’s” sci-fi films to come out in recent years (the only others I can think off off the top of my head being Gattaca, Contact, and 2001). I watched the movie last night, and will probably be digging into the special features tonight…most likely with a seperate post to follow.

Say Anything: One of my favorite 80’s films, and the one to cement John Cusack in my brain as an actor to keep track of. This is the second in the unofficial ‘Cusack series’ that my friend Royce and I enjoy, where though they’re all seperate and unrelated films, we like to put them in a series simply because they star John Cusack, and he plays roughly the same character in each one. For the curious, here’s the series in full as it stands right now: Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer for his formative High School years, Say Anything for High School graduation, Grosse Pointe Blank for the 10-year reunion, and High Fidelity for the thirty-something years.