Went out to see Memento last night. I’d been curious about this one ever since I started hearing about it, and even more curious once I saw the trailer. The main character has suffered a brain injury, and has a condition where he cannot form any new memories. The last thing he can actually remember is his wife’s murder — everything else that happens to him fades in a few minutes. He can’t remember anyone for more than just a couple minutes, if conversations last too long he won’t know how they got started…interesting enough on its own, but during the film, he’s actually trying to track down the man who raped and killed his wife. Notes all over the place, key clues tattooed onto his body…a man obsessed, but incapacitated by being completely limited to short term memory. In addition, the film is told in an extremely ‘dis-linear’ (the director’s term) style…in other words, it doesn’t start at the beginning and end at the end. Similar to Pulp Fiction, only more. Very, very cool — certainly the best film I’ve seen so far in 2001, and I’m so looking forward to it coming out for sale — I need to watch it quite a few more times just to make sure I’m seeing everything correctly!
TV And Films
The shows and movies I like (or don’t).
The Emperor’s new Superman
The Emperor’s New Groove: I generally enjoy Disney‘s films, but this one seemed to be kind of odd — for once, we weren’t subjected to the media blitz that Disney is so good at, and the movie kind of snuck through the theaters — I wasn’t even sure when it arrived or left the theaters here in town. But the closer it came to the release day of the DVD, I heard more and more people talking about how good this one actually was…and eventually just went ahead and got it. End result? Absolutely hilarious! I was quite literally laughing out loud quite a few times during this flick. It’s something of a step back in a way — visually it uses a lot less of the CGI that is becoming so prevalent, and concentrates more on traditional cell animation, and the humor is much more along the style of the sly, more adult humor of Aladdin. Very, very cool — a definite keeper.
Superman: It wasn’t until I actually started watching this tonight that I realized just how long it had been since I’d seen this movie…it was almost an entirely new experience for me, as I’d forgotten most of the movie. And what an experience! They’ve done an incredible job restoring the film, complete with a newly mixed Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack that is just incredible. What a wonderfully fun film, and a great little bit of nostalgia, too. All in all, not a bad evening of movie watching.
Gladiators, gladiators, gladiators…and spacemen
Not much went on today…other than the usual purchases of DVD’s to add to the ever growing collection. :) So — on with today’s bits (because I’m sure you’re all just incredibly captivated by what I choose to spend my money on…).
Spartacus: Yet another that I’ve been crazy enough to purchase sight unseen, based solely on the recommendations I’ve gotten on it — though it did seem to go quite nicely with my recent purchases of Ben-Hur and Gladiator. Besides, it’s a Stanley Kubrick film, who I generally really like, and the DVD is part of the Criterion Collection, who consistently does really incredible work with their releases. This is a 2-disc set with an absolute ton of extras…looking forward to spending quite a few hours delving into this.
Star Trek TOS Vol. 21: Finally, Paramount releases more Star Trek episodes! I’m so hoping that when they decide to put out Next Generation and Deep Space 9 they do it in season sets rather than trickling out two discs of two episodes each every few months like they’ve been doing. Anyway, enough of the soapbox…this volume contains two of the most known comedic shows that Star Trek made — I, Mudd, and The Trouble With Tribbles.
Star Trek TOS Vol. 22: Kind of funny, actually, since the first of the two episodes on this one fits right in with the gladiatorial theme I’ve got going. Two episodes on this disc, as usual — Bread and Circuses and Journey to Babel.
Okay, that’s it. It’s almost 2am, and I’m tired. Time to head off to bed.
Mars and More
Well…the Mars night didn’t go off as well as I’d hoped, unfortunately. Made it through Mission to Mars relatively unscathed, aside from the fact that it was a fairly amazingly hideous movie. I think if it had tried any harder to be 2001, it would have been truly laughable…as it is, it’s just kinda sad.
After M2M, I popped in Red Planet. This one started out much better. It was actually keeping my interest, and had been fairly entertaining…up until the halfway point (chapter 19), when the DVD I’d rented was scratched badly enough to completely freeze up my player, to the point where it wouldn’t even turn off! Ugh…so now I’ve seen the first half of Red Planet, and really want to finish it up one of these days!
Oh, the newest addition to the movie collection: Tank Girl, all around fun, great one-liners, and Lori Petty! Fun fun fun….
And, that’s all I can think of to put up here for the moment…more when I think of something, I guess.
Downtime, upgrades, moving to Mars
Grrrr…frikkin’ bills. I dunno why everybody’s so picky about wanting their money on time.
Um…yeah. If you haven’t guessed, the reason for the recent downtime was nothing more than my own stupidity when it comes to billpaying. Sorry about that.
However, bills are paid, and everything’s back up and running again. I took advantage of the server going up and down to install the 10.0.1 update to Mac OS X that hit the ‘net today…and, have to admit, this is nice. Not sure what might be there as far as new features, but it’s a heck of a lot faster. Woohoo!
Anyway, not much going on at the moment — since Studio 99 switched me to Saturdays, I’m not dj’ing tonight…so actually have a night to relax. Went out and rented Mission To Mars and Red Planet to watch tonight. Going off to Mars this evening…see y’all when I get back!
Movie marquee oops!
(via the Home Theater Forum and the Daily Radar)
Renee…yum…
Not much big going on today — other than that I was the only person in my close circle of friends who went to work today. Loren just got back from his job working on an oil rig for one of the slope companies, and Rick, Erika, and Miranda were all here at home sick. Bleah. I dunno who got the better end of the deal…probably me, though.
It was, however, something of a Renee Zellweger day for me — picked up two movies with her in it. Not really setting out to do that, just that they both got released today.
First off is Empire Records, a wonderfully silly little story of a bunch of kids working in a record store. Mark and Lucas are hilarious, the eye candy is nice, the script is fun, and a lot of the music is great. Unfortunately, the soundtrack for the film only featured music by today’s “hot” bands, so all the really good music is only in the movie…but at least it’s there.
The other I picked up is one that I consider to be one of the best, if not the single best movie to come out in 2000 — Nurse Betty. While it’s definitely a (very) black comedy, it’s one of the few I’ve found that manages to be a black comedy while still retaining a real heart of gold at the center and doesn’t just descend into full-out nihilistic cynicism — which a lot of black comedies do, much as I enjoy them. When I saw this film in the theater, I literally walked out of the film with a huge grin on my face — not because of the dark humor in the film (though I did enjoy that), but by the wonderful (and, dare I say it, sweet) ending that wrapped it all up. I really think it’s an absolute treasure of a film, and am all sorts of happy to have it.
In case you haven’t seen it, Nurse Betty is the story of Betty, a sweet and incredibly naive housewife (Renee Zellweger) who quite literally mentally breaks down when she witnesses the murder of her husband by a couple of con men (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock). She retreats into a world where she is in love with the character of a doctor on “A Reason to Love,” the soap opera she watches daily, and sets off to drive to Hollywood to meet her long-lost lover. Now, read that last sentence carefully — she’s not in love with the actor who plays the doctor (Greg Kinnear) — she’s in love with the doctor himself. Meanwhile, chasing her on her road trip are the two con men, who want something her husband had put in the trunk of the car she’s driving. There’s a lot more to the film than that simple summary can do justice to, and the cast plays it to perfection — there is a scene where Betty comes back to her senses and realizes what has been happenig which is just heartrending, to the point where it’s almost painful to watch as the real world comes crashing back in to her. However, with all that, as I said, I walked out of the theater with a huge grin on my face, marvelling at the work I’d just watched. Well worth finding, in my opinion.
So, that’s it for today….
Neil Gaiman’s ‘Goliath’
I just wanted to throw this link up really quickly before I crash for the night.
If you enjoyed the movie The Matrix at all, you really should check out the official website. Rather than just using it to promote the movie and its upcoming sequels, they’ve got a whole section of the site devoted to exploring the universe of the Matrix, primarily through online comics, with a few short stories.
There’s a lot of really neat stories in there — while not dealing directly with Neo or the other characters from the movie, all the authors have been given free reign to explore the possible storylines of this fictional universe.
The one I’d like to point out, however, is ‘Goliath’, by Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman has in recent years become one of my favorite modern authors — as well as the Sandman comic books (which are just incredible, by the way), he’s written some fiction, both on his own and with other authors (the book Good Omens was written with Terry Pratchett, and is just hilarious). With ‘Goliath’, he contributes his own take on the Matrix with a short story that I find to be one of the best contributions on the Matrix site.
In any case, if you’re at all into The Matrix, Neil Gaiman, or just really well-written short fiction, I highly suggest you take a few minutes and give it a read.
Okay, so I’m a junkie
Hi. My name is Woody, and I’m a DVD-aholic.
Hi, Woody!
Yeah, so…I went through and compared my actual DVD collection with the database program that keeps track of them all and provides the DVD listing that I have here on my website. Turns out I had a few of my roomie’s listed in there that I needed to delete…but I also had a few of my own that I hadn’t put in there. End result?
I passed the 300 mark a week or two ago, it seems….I now have a total of 308 DVD’s.
Boy, am I glad I’ve got a decent paying job!
Bueller’s giant rabbit gladiator
Three additions to the collection today, as it was a pretty decent paycheck from Suncoast this week. Here’s what we’ve got….
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: probably the quintessential skipping school film. There really is no excuse for not having seen this one — so if you haven’t go find it. So there. Bleah. Bueller? Bueller? Bueller…?
Harvey: I’d actually never seen this one until last year when my friend Marc introduced it to me. Probably one of the single sweetest films I’ve ever seen, this story of a good-natured man and his best friend — a six-foot tall invisible rabbit — is a true classic, and one of Jimmy Stewart’s best performances. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.
And finally, the last for the day, one I actually haven’t seen yet, but am looking forward to finally watching: Ben-Hur. One of the most famous and truly epic films ever made, and a cornerstone of Charleton Heston’s career, this film actually had the all time record for Academy Awards (11) up until some little film about a sinking boat came along a couple years ago. The only trick with this one is going to be finding some time when I can set aside three hours to watch the full thing in one sitting…when in my life do I have that much uninterrupted time? Ah, well, I’ll find it.