#1,266: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I was right! Woo! About what? Only GREATNESS!

I made a mad dash across LA (close up the office, descend 9 stories, hike 3 blocks, drive 8 miles, find parking!) and got into the Cinerama Dome for some super close screen-wraps-around me seats, and I was not the least bit disappointed!

Now I know it'll be everyone's favorite game to explain why they hate it, and I know it's not Raiders, and I know Harrison Ford aged in the past 20 years, and there are even things I didn't like about the movie, and none of it matters. I sat in darkness, surrounded by cheering Americans, with a grin and a sense of wonder and excitement, eager to see what might happen next.

Like Indy himself, the movie makes mistakes, but it always dives in with abandon and somehow makes it out on the other side. But, and this is important, it ISN'T The Phantom Menace. I was -such- a Star Wars fan in that time, and I had tickets for multiple screenings, and I couldn't wait, and I came out of the first showing trying to rationalize and justify and the simple fact was that I didn't dig it. And again, this isn't that.

For technical stuff, I liked that the lighting was non-realistic, which I imagine conforms to the style of the previous flicks (time for some re-viewing!). I heard people bitching in the lobby, but at least in my super-close seats, nothing looked egregiously CG to me. There are things that I know must have been, but I was sufficiently swept up in things, I guess.

Mike H. at the Nexpress? Didn't like Last Crusade, won't like this. People who need to show their taste and class and hipness by disliking popular stuff? Who say 'it was good for what it was' or 'well, it was entertaining, but...'? It's okay to like things. Really!

More Indy!

Just thinking more about it, there were things I didn't enjoy - maybe he was a little too die hard 4 invincible, maybe the villain did less and less as the movie progressed (Actually, that's not really a complaint - more exploration and sharing cool stuff instead of conflict for its own sake wins with me), maybe the map just wasn't as cool as the grail diary, but it still doesn't matter, as explained above. (Or in blogland, below?) But unless you agree with me that No Country for Old Men was an adventure, I don't remember the last good adventure movie to hit before this one. Certainly none of that awful national treasure / tomb raidery stuff.

Good things: Mutt was not nearly as awful as I thought he might be. The chase sequence was incredibly elaborate. There were subtle references (you know the ark is gonna show up) but it's not full of self-quotes and in-jokes.

Also, and the more I consider this, I think it's really neat - previous flicks are a 30s adventure with 80s tech. This movie, clearly chock full of modern whatchamacallits, doesn't dip back to the 30s, it's goes back 50 years, like the previous set. I think that's going to put a lot of people off, who were expecting the former. A number of the ideas, big and small, are concerns of 50s B-Movies.

So is it shaping up to be a lousy year for movies (I've seen 6 releases of 2008) or a great one (I really enjoyed 3 of 'em)?

And finally - eyes open! There's a Vertigo poster in there somewhere, though I didn't spot it.

#1,255: Lars and the Real Girl

Kinda didn't want to see this one. Notes: Players supported and "Yes, And"'d beautifully. The initiation was a little flat, so by the time the game appeared, we were already a little too far into crazytown. Blue on blue and all that. Good heightening while still keeping it real, and the edit was a good spot, since it couldn't go any further up than death. Remember not to kill your scene partner! In particular for Gus, try to work on the denials, and to Lars, we didn't mind too much when you ignored Gus' denying, but finding a way to justify might lead to even stronger choices.

#1,238: Juno

Moving this week. Found a place to move TO last week. Leaving the valley Hollywoodward. Stacking up little edit jobs to work on here and there. Writing things. And there's a radio-show-to-be.

Recent movies:

Sunshine - Wanting to like a movie isn't always enough. Already starting from a deficit by bearing similarities to Event Horizon (one of film's greatest embarrassments), this chronicle of human failure and monument to (as I understand it) bad science didn't win me over. There might be a lesson here, since Danny Boyle movies never do. Extra demerits awarded for requiring outside reading to explain the plot.

Michael Clayton - Solid. Monument to human weakness. Somewhat too neat and tidy an ending.

Harvey - Fantastic! Surprisingly 'modern,' given the kind of Hays Code-ish santization one imagines in movies from 1950. Dowd, Elwood P. is an American Hero.

Funny Games - The remake looms, so I saw the original. It should be a fun movie to see with a big audience. It was much more tense viewing based on what I'd been told about it than through its own merits. Even the new trailer is a shot-for-shot remake of the old trailer, at least until they get to the 'explain things to Americans' bit. And there's a genuine worth to repeat viewings.

Be Kind, Rewind - Gondry movie, shares some of the joy of the TV series Home Movies, in seeing the homemade solutions to fancy effects and costumes. Doesn't fret much more than it needs to on plot to string along the fun bits.

Jumper - Pretty much nothing happens after the first 15 minutes. Points for showing someone use a power selfishly (you'd use the Force to reach the remote if you could), demerits for Hayden Christenson. Points for having a snowglobe in the movie, demerits for having such an expensive snowglobe that there was no money available for an ending to the movie. It's kind of funny to see franchise-hungry companies make bold advances on trilogies that fizzle (ie, Eragon).

There Will Be Blood - More like There Will Be Boring. There was a fair amount of slapping though.

Juno - I had been avoiding this because it looked like a very calculated Napoleon Dynamite -styled monstrousity. Finding out Jason Reitman directed it tipped the scales for me. And there are some neat directorial ideas going on, but the movie drew a lot more Kif-shaped sighs than laughs for me. You can just wave at the jokes as they cruise by. Points for the notion of vacationing in Gettysburg, dozens of demerits for the Moldy Peaches. This movie really wants to be quotable.

1,195: No Country for Old Men

When I lived in Cleveland all the time, I saw a movie every Monday, whether there was something I wanted to see or not, because a ticket and a popcorn together were $5. Now I'm a little more choosey. However, thanks to the AMC theaters' "do whatever the hell you want" attitude toward patrons (re: no restrictions on outside food or beverages, no ushers entering the theaters themselves just about ever, and about a 50% chance of having someone available to tear your ticket) I can make one trip and check out a fair share of the current lineup.

First today, American Gangster. All in all a pretty typical rags to riches to prison uniform kind of story. Similar to Blood Diamond in that if not for the big stars making it, it might not be out of place on your Showtime channels or your direct-to-dvd racks. But it was preceded by a crazy music video, as part of the AMC 'first look' (similar to 'the 20' in other regions). Remember 3 Doors Down? The band that sang about Kryptonite? No, not Spin Doctors, the other one? Their song Citizen Soldier has been co-opted into a ridiculous National Guard advertisement, which shows National Guard troops fighting the Lobsterbacks, landing on D-Day, and feeling bad about bombing iraqis. It's peppered with slogans like 'I fired the shot that started a nation,' with utter disregard for the 'shot heard round the world' being fired by a British soldier, or the non-existance of the National Guard in colonial times. To be fair, one unit of the National Guard was on the ground on D-Day, so it wasn't TOTAL nonsense, but that was probably an accident.

Next up, Beowulf, in 3-D! I like hopping into 3D movies, since I have glasses saved up from...Meet the Robinsons, perhaps? Absolutely to the credit of this movie, the 3D effect worked great. Almost nothing else about the movie was very good though. A bit at the end was a fun videogame-style action thing, but it's mostly a lot of photorealistic hair pasted on cardboard cutouts of cartoon characters timed to some very silly dialogue. This version chooses to interpret the original poem about as accurately as my attempt to explain away MacBeth's 'dagger towards my hand' speech as sarcastic excuse-making. I like Neil Gaiman's work in writing just fine, but translation to other media doesn't seem to go so well. I wonder what specifically gets lost along the way. I also wonder if the 3D release differs slightly from the regular release, what with all the stuff flying at the camera all the time.

Last screening today was No Country for Old Men, which, all in all, was great. I was definitely worried at the start that we opened in media res, which is not the case, and there were some choices later on as well that I thought were fantastic. This movie accomplishes the sort of thing National Treasure -should- have, in terms of a satisfying 'adventure game' vibe, and that's not even the major force at work. This is also the first Coen bros. movie that I can attest to enjoying. All of the movies today seemed to have a lot of people walking out of them (one father clearly didn't realise he was taking his pack of younglings to see naked lady parts in 3D), but my favorite audience member was in this crowd.

As the credits began, a guy in front of me says "whoa, what the fuck was that all about? I can't wait to check IMDB to see what this was supposed to be about." His girlfriend (presumably) starts to tell him what she thought was going on, and immediately gets cut off. "No, just shut up, you don't know what you're talking about. I'd rather just read it from IMDB," he says.

On second thought, my favorite audience member might be the guy who actually wore a sombrero through all of Beowulf.