TV And Films

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

Transformers

by

So last night, giving in to our inner 12-year-olds, Rick and I went out to see Transformers, Michael Bay‘s latest assault on good moviemaking, good taste, and childhood memories.

Mini-review number one: It was glorious, incredible, over-the-top, in-your-face, enjoyably bad.

Mini-review number two: Moments of “holy shit, that was cool,” buried in a whole mess of, “what the fuck?”

In other words, it was exactly what I was afraid it might end up being: a bizarre combination of seeing the coolest toys from my childhood on screen as if they’d been ripped right out of my prepubescent imagination, and Michael Bay’s crack-addict-on-a-caffeine-IV approach to moviemaking. The man is such a hack, but he’s just so good at it that you end up walking out hating yourself for actually enjoying the dreck that he puts on screen.

More thoughts (some quite possibly spoileriffic) after the jump….

Read more

Rataphooey

by

Given that Ratatouille has just hit theaters, I feel compelled to revisit a question I asked just over a year ago: Is Pixar a ‘boys only’ club?

Just where are the girls in Pixar films? To date, there’s not a single Pixar film that has a female main character: The Incredibles comes the closest, but even there, both Helen Parr/Elastigirl and Violet are supporting characters, and it’s Bob Parr/Mr. Incredible that’s the hero.

Come on, Pixar. You’ve done superheroes, bugs, cars, cowboy and space toys…isn’t it time to take the ‘NO GIRLS ALLOWED’ sign off of the clubhouse door?

Frahnk-en-steeeen!

by

In the vein of “The Producers” (the recent film version — y’know, the film version of the musical stage version of the original film — had Prairie and me practically in tears of laughter when we watched it, and quickly gained a permanent spot in our movie collection), Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is being turned into a stage musical (no word…yet…on the eventual film version of the musical stage version of the original film).

As is becoming something of a trend (one that I happen to be quite fond of), the show is premiering here in Seattle before opening on Broadway.

And Prairie and I have tickets for August 7 — opening night.

Nosebleed section, of course — Mezzanine 31, Row V, sets 7 and 8, virtually the very top rear right of the building — but opening night tickets none the less. We’re quite excited about this.

“Wasn’t your hump on the other side?”

(pause)

“What hump?”

Art imitates Life imitates Art…

by

A beautiful opening paragraph from a review of one of my favorite movies, Brazil:

In Brazil, Terry Gilliam asks the audience to imagine a world where the government wages a never-ending war with shadowy terrorists, a world where civil liberties are being destroyed in the name of security, a world where torture becomes official state policy in order to conduct more efficient interrogations of suspected terrorists. What’s more, in Gilliam’s fictional world, the central government is not just secretive but incompetent. Mistakes are made, leading to the imprisonment and torture of innocents. Most offensive of all, Gilliam implies that such a government could exist without its citizens staging an armed revolt. I’m usually willing to suspend disbelief, but this goes too entirely too far.

Took me long enough…

by

Last night, Prairie and I went off on a search for two particular movies that she’s going to be showing her kids (that is, the ones she teaches) at school: The Pursuit of Happyness and Noises Off. TPoH was easy enough, but NO was a little more difficult. The Blockbuster closest to us is fairly new, so is stocked almost entirely with new releases, and the next closest Blockbuster didn’t have it either. “Where now?” I asked.

Prairie thought for a moment. “Well, Scarecrow’s just down Roosevelt a ways, and it’s supposed to be good. We could try them.”

So, we headed down and wandered into Scarecrow Video for the first time. It was bigger than we expected, so we started by finding one of the guys at the counter to see if he could tell us where to find NO. “Oh, sure,” he said. “It’s right over there in the directors’ section, under Peter Bogdanovich.”

The director’s section? It was just what it sounded like, shelf after shelf of films organized by director. How cool!

Prairie and I spent about the next half hour just wandering through the store, dodging in and out of rooms (“Look — a ‘literature’ section…it’s organized by playwright!”), laughing at the ‘genres’ used to organize (“Christsploitation?!”), and generally trying to figure out why it had taken us this long to actually discover the place!

Of course, at this point, local movie aficionados (ahem, kalyx…) will be giving me your basic (and well deserved), “Well, DUH!” ;) I’d heard about Scarecrow for years, knew that it was supposed to be ‘the’ place to go locally for movies, but for some reason, just hadn’t ever actually wandered in.

Well, that’s just been fixed, and Blockbuster just lost a couple more accounts….

Quote of the Day

by

There’s a long standing theory that Hollywood action movies deliberately play up US urban gang violence…a part of a propaganda effort to persuade foreigners that America is not to be [messed] with. The British equivalent is Faulty Towers and Monty Python, which simply makes people want to stay the hell away in case it’s contagious.

— originally somewhere in this forum thread, via learethak