Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Culture

Forbidden Kingdom

April 22, 2008
Leave a Comment

Quickie review of Forbidden Kingdom:

Two of the fight scenes are excellent, and the rest are pretty good.

I mean, you’re not seeing it for the plot, which is light. You’re seeing it because it’s the first time Jet Li and Jackie Chan have been in a movie together, and despite the fact that you’re nervous about Rob Minkoff’s directing (I mean, The Lion King?), Woo-ping Yuen is a great action choreographer.

It works out pretty well. Michael Angarano is not a completely embarassing martial arts actor; in particular, during his one extended fight scene, he does a decent job of being outclassed by the Witch of the Wolves. Everyone else is solid, of course. The Jackie Chan/Jet Li fight scene is superb and just about as good as you’d have wanted it to be, even with both of them aging.

And as far as I can tell, all the Westerners involved have a fondness for Hong Kong martial arts flicks. Nobody’s trying to dress this up or make it deep — it’s just another kung fu movie with a big premise and some time travel. Exposition is for art movies. If you don’t know who the Eight Immortals are, you can either find out on your own or live without understanding some of the references.

So I liked it, even though the South Boston accents were abysmal.

Mike Doughty on Encores

April 10, 2008
Leave a Comment

“OK, here’s the plan for the rest of the night. We’re gonna play the next song, then we’re gonna play the fake last song. Then I’m gonna introduce the other guys on the stage, with their Christian name, their nickname, possibly their Zodiac sign, their place of birth, and their surname. Then we’re gonna turn our backs to you and act like we’re off stage for a few moments. Then we’re gonna turn around, pretend to be surprised, and play some more music and then the show will end.”

New Stephenson

April 1, 2008
Leave a Comment

As per this news. The novel is titled Anathem, and the blurb follows:

Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians — sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable “saecular” world that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides that only these cloistered scholars have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his cohorts are summoned forth without warning into the Unknown.

Graphing Box Office

February 26, 2008
Leave a Comment

This is the coolest graph I’ve seen in a while. It’s a picture of box office grosses per movie over time, from 1986 to the present day. Very clever. You can see the evolution of the summer blockbuster, not to mention the winter blockbuster trend.

There Will Be Blood

February 20, 2008
Leave a Comment

It’s harder reviewing the really, really good movies. What more are you going to say about There Will Be Blood? Yeah, Daniel Day-Lewis was awesome, and Paul Dano was too. The soundtrack was terribly cool — I didn’t read it as a horror movie soundtrack so much as I took it to be a parallel narrative of the industrialization of the United States. It groaned and crashed and squealed like machinery. Lovely.

The movie is the awesome achievement everyone’s saying it is. 2007 was an insanely good year for Americana movies, what with this plus No Country for Old Men. P. T. Anderson has pretty much come into his own.

Hm, one interesting aspect of the movie, which is not exactly a surprise if you’ve seen anything else Anderson’s made: there’s about zero narrative thrust. Most of the big pivotal events aren’t foreshadowed, and have no build up. There’s a distinct arc of degradation as Daniel Plainview descends into the depths of misanthropy, but there’s not exactly a story there. It’s simply people being people.

See it. Love it.

Strike’s Over

February 13, 2008
Leave a Comment

And the WGA more or less won. It’s been really interesting to watch; this is the first US strike I’m aware of in which the PR battle was fought on blogs. And when you get right down to it, the writers make a living writing persuasive prose, so it’s not entirely surprising that the PR went well. On the other hand, it’s also the case that this strike didn’t affect the majority of the public in the way that, say, a garbage collection strike does. That helped PR too.

Still, the next time the Teamsters strike, they ought to get the WGA to help out with their PR work. It’d be interesting to see if the same PR strategy works. You get so much mileage in this sort of struggle when people see you as a human being.