Film

While I’m not nearly as much of a movie buff as many, I do like ’em and watch ’em when I can.

Ebert’s obsession with Brittany Murphy

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Mike pointed to Ebert’s review of “Little Black Book” today, pointing out an entertaining anecdote about actress Brittany Murphy.

As for Brittany Murphy, for me it goes back to the 2003 Independent Spirit Awards, held the day before the Oscars in a big tent on the beach at Santa Monica. Murphy was assigned to present one of the awards. Her task was to read the names of the five nominees, open an envelope and reveal the name of the winner. This she turned into an opportunity for screwball improvisational comedy, by pretending she could not follow this sequence, not even after the audience shouted instructions and the stage manager came out to whisper in her ear not once but twice. There were those in the audience who were dumbfounded by her stupidity. I was dumbfounded by her brilliance. I had a front-row seat, and was convinced her timing was too good, her double-takes too perfect, her pauses too wicked, to even possibly be authentic. She was taking a routine task and turning it into the opportunity to steal a scene and leave everybody in the tent chattering about her performance. You can’t screw up that entertainingly by accident. You have to know exactly what you’re doing.

After reading it, I was a little curious as to whether any video footage of the event might be floating around the ‘net, and started Googling for ‘brittany murphy independent spirit awards’. As it turns out, this is at least the third time Ebert has mentioned Brittany’s pseudo-stumble.

From his April 4, 2003 review of “Spun”:

Murphy made quite an impact at the Independent Spirit Awards by being unable to master the concept of reading the five nominees before opening the envelope, despite two helpful visits from the stage manager and lots of suggestions from the audience, but with Murphy, you always kind of wonder if she doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing.

And from his August 15, 2003 review of “Updown Girls”:

The theory is that Brittany Murphy is trying to channel Marilyn Monroe, but as I watched “Uptown Girls,” another name came to mind: Lucille Ball. Murphy has a kind of divine ineptitude that moves beyond Marilyn’s helplessness into Lucy’s dizzy lovability. She is like a magnet for whoops! moments.

I remember her as a presenter at the 2003 Independent Spirit Awards, where her assignment was to read the names of five nominees, open an envelope and read the winner. This she was unable to do, despite two visits by a stage manager who whispered helpful suggestions into her ear. She kept trying to read every nominee as the winner, and when she finally arrived triumphantly at the real winner, she inspired no confidence that she had it right.

Some thought she was completely clueless, or worse. I studied her timing and speculated that she knew exactly what she was doing, and that while it took no skill at all to get it right, it took a certain genius to get it so perfectly wrong. She succeeded in capturing the attention of every person in that distracted and chattering crowd, and I recalled “Lucy” shows where everyone in a restaurant would suddenly be looking at her.

Something tells me she made an impression on Ebert. ;)

I’d still like to see a video clip of this at some point, though I had no luck digging one up. I’m also a bit more curious about Brittany, who I’d never (to my memory) actually heard of before now.

iTunes: “Nighttrain” by Public Enemy from the album Apocalypse 91…The Enemy Strikes Black (1991, 3:27).

Batman Begins

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While I knew that Waner Brothers was working on bringing the Batman franchise back from the neon grave that Joel Schumacher buried it in, I had no idea that the project was this far along: the teaser trailer has just been posted.

The trailer doesn’t really show me enough to be absolutely sure, but it does look promising. What looks more promising, however, was the cast they’ve lined up for this thing!

With any luck, we just might get a watchable Batman movie again.

(via Ryan)

iTunes: “Girls of the Night (Elite Force)” by Surreal Madrid from the album Black Flys pres. Club Flys 3: Late Night (1998, 6:16).

Tattoo number two: Ouroboros

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Some time ago, I got my first tattoo: a yin-yang made of smiley faces, a design I was taken with because of the symbolism of the yin-yang (light and dark intertwined and dependent upon each other) and the incorporation of the smiley face, which I interpreted as meaning that light or dark, good or bad, there’s some good in every situation.

For some time now, I’ve been pondering what to get as a second tattoo. I didn’t want to get something merely because it “looked cool” or struck my fancy for a passing moment. Rather, I wanted to get something to both complement and balance the tattoo I already had. As the smiley yin-yang is a roughly 3 inch diameter circle on my right upper arm/shoulder, I knew I something similar on my left upper arm, but I wanted to find something that matched thematically, as well as visually.

Nothing struck my fancy for quite a few years, but off and on for the past year or so, I’ve been thinking more and more seriously about one particular design that first caught my eye when I was around eleven or so.

At that time, movies often came to Anchorage months after they had wide release in the lower 48. I’d seen trailers on television for a new fantasy movie that looked incredibly cool: The Neverending Story. However, the movie just didn’t ever seem to come out, and I eventually went out and picked up the book by Michael Ende.

I completely and entirely fell in love with the book (and later was somewhat disappointed by the movie when it eventually hit Anchorage — it’s enjoyable and a lot of fun on its own, but it only covers the first half of the book, ignores roughly half of that, and scrambles what little is left), but the cover of that edition of the book featured stills from the movie, and had Atreyu’s amulet, the Auryn, featured prominently on the front cover.

The Neverending Story

The Auryn in the film was actually a stylized version of an Ouroboros: while the traditional Ouroboros is a single snake consuming its own tail, the Auryn was designed as two intertwined snakes, one light and one dark, each consuming the other’s tail.

The symbol has stuck with me ever since then, and more and more often as of late, it’s been popping into my head as what I’d like to get to complement the tattoo I already have. I spent a little time this morning trying to find good images and information on the symbol — something of a difficult task, unfortunately, as there are quite a few possible spellings of Ouroboros — but have found a bit of each. I’m not sure if I’ve found an image that’s clean enough for me to give to a tattoo artist yet, but I did confirm some of what I’d already believed of the symbolism of the Ouroboros:

The ouroboros has several meanings interwoven into it. Foremost is the symbolism of the serpent biting, devouring, eating its own tail. This symbolises the cyclic Nature of the Universe: creation out of destruction, Life out of Death. The ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life, in an eternal cycle of renewal. In the above drawing, from a book by an early Alchemist, Cleopatra, the black half symbolises the Night, Earth, and the destructive force of nature, yin. The light half represents Day, Heaven, the generative, creative force, yang.

So it looks to me like we’ve got a winner. Now, the search is on for a good, clean image that will work well as a black-and-white tattoo. Once that’s done, it’ll be time to get inked again!

iTunes “Behind the Wheel” by Kirk from the album Trancemode Express 1.01: A Tribute to Depeche Mode (1996, 7:30).

Pay attention to the road, you idiots

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Years ago, while driving around Anchorage, I glanced to my right and saw a couple guys driving around with a portable DVD player sitting on the dashboard of their car, quite happily watching a movie as they motored around town. Very unamused by their obvious disregard to the safety of themselves and those around them, I made sure to move a lane over so that I wasn’t next to them, and then spent the next few minutes ranting to whoever I was in the passenger seat about the idiodicy of trying to drive and watch a DVD at the same time.

Well, with the boom in fancy car toys over the last few years, including things like in-car DVD players, the inevitable has finally happened: two people in Alaska were killed by a driver watching a movie on a dash-mounted DVD player.

In what may be the first trial of its kind in the nation, prosecutors have accused the pickup truck’s driver of second-degree murder for watching a movie instead of the road when he crashed head-on into the Jeep.

The pickup’s driver, Erwin J. Petterson Jr., denies using the DVD player as he drove north on October 12, 2002 and contends he was only listening to music from a compact disc, said his attorney, Chuck Robinson.

[…]

After the crash, Petterson and his passenger, roommate Jonathan Douglas, were transported to an Anchorage hospital. Within hours, Douglas called his ex-wife and told her he was not sure how the collision occurred because he was “spacing out on a movie they were watching,” according to prosecutors. The woman is scheduled to testify.

David Weiser, 34, the son of the slain couple, said only two people know what happened in the cab of the truck. But equipping a truck with entertainment options that can be used while driving goes beyond a momentary distraction of putting on makeup or using a cell phone, he said.

“This takes forethought, this takes methodical steps,” David Weiser said. \”You have to go to the store, plop over money, install it, and install it so it can be used without a brake employed.

“I view it as no different than walking into a bar, having five beers within an hour and getting behind the wheel,” said Weiser, who quit an eight-year career as a loan originator in Boston to attend the trial.

It’s very simple, people. If you’re driving a car, then drive the damn car. Don’t jabber on a phone (I don’t care how many times you tell me it doesn’t affect your driving — studies show that cell phone usage while driving is at least as dangerous as driving under the influence of alcohol, and if I know that you’re calling me from a cell phone while on the road, I will hang up on you), don’t watch a damn movie, and for God’s sake, pay attention to driving!

(via /.)

iTunes: “Entrada and Shootout” by Goldenthal, Elliot from the album Heat (1995, 1:45).

De-Lovely

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Quite aptly titled, this one. De-Lovely, the Cole Porter biopic is wonderful — good music (of course), wonderful to look at, and I wouldn’t be surprised at an Oscar nod for Ashley Judd.

One question, though: fashions have been reaching into the past for “retro” looks for the past couple decades, with a lot of emphasis on the 70’s and 80’s. Could we please cast a little further back so that the fashions of the 30’s and 40’s would come back into style? There’s a level of class that seems to have gone missing, and I’d love to see it come back.

iTunes: “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love)” by Morissette, Alanis from the album De-Lovely (2004, 3:21).

Spamalot

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Coming to Broadway in early 2005: Monty Python’s ‘Spamalot’, \”the musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture, ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail.\”‘

Starring David Hyde Pierce as Sir Robin, Hank Azaria as Lancelot…and Tim Curry as King Arthur.

If there’s any way I can find the time and money, it just might be time for me to find a way to visit New York.

(You’ve just gotta love the picture caption in that CNN article, too….)

(via Dori Smith)

iTunes: “Starship (Raumschiff) Edelweiss” by Edelweiss from the album Wonderful World of Edelweiss (1992, 4:02).

Kill Bill – Part Three

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I actually heard a rumor about this a couple of weeks ago, but I just now got around to a quick Google to see if there was any truth to what I’d heard. Apparently there is — Tarantino is planning on a third part to the Kill Bill saga.

In fifteen years.

“I have plans, actually not right away, but like in 15 years from now, I’ll do a third version of this saga,” the director said at a news conference to promote “Kill Bill — Vol. 2,” which opens in Spain next month.

Tarantino said part three would focus on the daughter of a hired killer that Uma Thurman’s character bumps off early in her revenge spree.

So. Incredibly. Cool.

iTunes: “Comfortably Numb” by Band, The/Morrison, Van/Waters, Roger from the album The Wall Live in Berlin (1990, 8:02).

Fahrenheit 9/11

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At this point, writing up much of a review is more or less pointless. If you’re of a mind to see this film, you’re quite likely to already, and if you’re not planning on seeing it — well, you should.

Most of what was in Fahrenheit 9/11 I knew about already, of course, having been trolling the various political sites regularly for a while now. The single biggest bit that I didn’t know much about beforehand was shots of the protests in DC during Bush’s inauguration. I’m not in the least surprised that there were protests, I just wasn’t paying as much attention to the news back then, and hadn’t heard much about what happened.

I was also very impressed by how Moore handled the day of the attacks. Rather than show us the same footage of the airplanes hitting the towers that we’ve seen time and time again, he stayed with footage of the reactions of people in the street as they gazed up at the towers, and later, as they moved through the streets, ash and papers floating down around them out of the sky. Far more effective and powerful than if he’d stuck to footage that we’d already seen enough times to become at least somewhat inured to the horror.

I was also a little surprised at some of the things that weren’t mentioned in the film. At one point, Moore mentions some of the member nations that joined the US in the “Coalition of the Willing” for the attack against Iraq, calling out a few that didn’t actually have any military forces to contribute. What he didn’t choose to mention, though, was something that I looked into at one point — the human rights records of the member nations. Rather disturbing to see what some of our partners in “fighting for democracy” are doing on their own turf.

My one real worry about the film is that it’s going to be preaching to the choir for most of its run. At least now, in its initial theatrical run, it’s far more likely that the majority of the people seeing it are people like me, who don’t need to be convinced that Bush needs to go. If Moore and Lion’s Gate/Miramax can get Fahrenheit 9/11 into the video market by mid-to late September or early October, though, the increased exposure of rentals might end up reaching a far wider range of people who aren’t as likely to bother seeing it in the theatre.

One can hope, at least.

iTunes: “Instruments of Darkness” by Art of Noise, The from the album Best of Rave, The Vol. 1 (1991, 3:40).

Spider Man 2

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Completely on a whim tonight after getting home from work, I decided to head down to see if I could get into an opening-night showing of Spider Man 2. Grabbed a book for the pre-show wait, wandered down to the theater…and apparently the 11pm show that I picked wasn’t the most popular show around, as there were only three people already waiting when I showed up around 10:30pm, and by the time the show started, the theater was only about half full.

Not that that’s really anything to complain about, of course, since it got me choice seating. :)

Overall, Spider Man 2 is a lot of fun. Walking home and turning it over in my head, I kept coming back to the same basic thoughts I had about Spider Man, to the point where I was starting to wonder if I could simply re-post my thoughts about the first film. Obviously, I’m not doing that — not least because after re-reading my Spider Man post, I’m not quite as wild about Spider Man 2 as I was about the first — but there are some definite similarities.

In both films, the action is in many ways the true star of the film. Tobey Maguire is still perfect as Peter Parker/Spider Man, Kirsten Dunst is still oh-so-yummy as Mary Jane, and Alfred Molina absolutely steals the show as Doc Ock. Once again, though, it’s Sam Raimi‘s direction that shines through, and I really don’t think these films would be anywhere near as enjoyable with anyone else at the helm.

Doctor Otto Octavius is every bit as cool as I was hoping he’d be. The effects work on his cybernetic tentacles was incredibly done, and a character that stood a very good chance of ending up little more than laughable in being transitioned from the printed page to the screen instead became a very credible villain. In updating the good doctor to today’s world, the filmmakers dropped the idea of his controlling his extra arms telepathically (which I believe was the original idea) and instead have the arms controlled via a cybernetic link directly into the doctor’s spinal column. One of the tweaks I liked a lot was the addition of video cameras in the center of each arm’s ‘hand’, giving Doc Ock the ability to see anything one of his arms was pointing at. Nicely done, and it very much helps explain his ability to keep track of events going on around him during some of the melees that he and Spidey get into.

While the action sequences in general are certainly the high points of the movie — each of the battles between Spidey and Doc Ock are a blast to watch — there was one sequence that was by far my favorite. Just after the accident that permanently fuses the tentacles to Doc Ock’s body, he is taken to a hospital where surgeons plan to amputate the cybernetic apparatus in an attempt to save his life. The tentacles suddenly spring to life, and we’re thrust in to Sam Raimi at his lunatic best in a sequence that in many ways could be cut directly into The Evil Dead. With no music, the soundtrack filled with nothing but the screams, crashes, and general mayhem as the tentacles wreak havoc in the operating theater, Raimi pulls out all the stops and gives us all the crazy camera angles, whip-pans, zooms, and visual insanity that made the action sequences in The Evil Dead so much fun, and this fanboy ate up every single second of it.

As with the first film, though, Spider Man 2 is certainly not without its flaws. The abortive romance between Peter Parker and MJ often seems to just drag the film to a sudden halt whenever we switch back to their relationship — where Spider Man had a tendency to get overly-sappy, Spider Man 2 fails to give us any real reason why MJ would have any interest in Peter Parker at all. While the subplot is a necessity, both in motivating the characters to take some of their actions and in staying true to the original comic, it consistently fails to ever really engage the audience, and we’re left waiting for the villain to show up just to make things interesting again.

However, the biggest flaw for me was that the last ten minutes or so of the film didn’t feel like they were wrapping up the events at all — rather, it comes across as an extended trailer for the inevitable Spider Man 3. A pity, really, as even with its flaws, I’d definitely enjoyed the movie itself, and I ended up leaving the theater with a slightly sour feeling, as if the only thing missing before the credits rolled was a big “TO BE CONTINUED…” message splashed across the screen. These days, we all know that there’s likely going to be another chapter in the saga. Do we really need to have it beaten into our heads? Ah, well.

iTunes: “Pump Up the Volume” by M/A/R/R/S from the album Pump Up the Volume (1987, 7:12).

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