Michael Bay’s production company is working on remakes of:
Near Dark was just fine the way it was. Grrr. Who the hell is Samuel Bayer? I suppose I’m upset about Hitchcock remakes too.
I’m not really upset about Friday the 13th, though.
Category: Culture
I’ve seen a few critics recommending minimal knowledge of Cloverfield going into the movie, and I think that’s right. It’s also a sign that it’s a gimmick movie. That’s not a pejorative, since there’s nothing wrong with gimmick movies, but you always have to ask: does the gimmick contribute to the story?
In this case, since the story’s more about how people react to the giant monster eating New York City than it is about the monster, I think the answer’s yes. To the degree that Cloverfield doesn’t succeed, it’s not any fault of the found footage conceit. Rather, it’s that the characters aren’t all that interesting, excepting our primary cameraman Hud. They aren’t boring, per se. I cheered for them. I just wouldn’t have been cheering if it hadn’t been a monster movie.
No question but that it was enjoyable, however. The craft of the movie is superb; what this gains over The Blair Witch Project is choice. A good cinematographer thought about what he could get out of the camera and executed really well. There’s some cute stuff with earlier recorded material that also works nearly perfectly.
And damn, it’s a scary monster. Great design; it’s menacing and terrifying and unstoppable in the correct measure. The 9/11 parallels are pretty clear, in that we’re going to inevitably draw them, but the movie acknowledges them deliberately in the opening scenes and I think that pulls any fangs there might be.
Well worth the movie ticket. Bring Dramamine if you get sick easily.
I saw No Country for Old Men weeks ago, and it’s taken me this long to come to grips with it; or to at least find an entrance point for discussion that made sense to me. I spent a while musing on the nihilistic nature of the movie. My first draft of this noted “family counts for nothing except danger, and the monsters are not destined for jail time.”
But that’s not true. I’ve seen nihilistic movies. A truly nihilistic movie ignores consequences; the crop of Tarantino/Besson-influenced movies come far closer to nihilism than No Country for Old Men. Consider Snatch, in which the protagonists are pretty completely immoral but walk free at the end. I liked Snatch but there’s about zero morality in the whole thing.
No Country for Old Men is full of morality. The gut punch of an ending wouldn’t be powerful if it wasn’t full of morality. Chigurh is a monster, and the movie makes no bones of that fact, and he’s expected to meet his fate at the end. Sheriff Bell is his counterpart in morality, occupying the benevolent side of the Western drama. Or, perhaps, Moss will bring justice — he’s not a good person per se, but he does represent the sanctity of family. You don’t mess with a man’s family.
And then the trapdoor opens, and then the ground is gone from underneath us. It’s not nihilistic, it’s darker. Consequences do matter, but sometimes they don’t work out. This is what makes it such a strong conclusion.
Show me a semi-hot newish show, and I’m likely to want to read the books it was based on. They’re more portable, after all. Accordingly, I picked up and read Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dearly Devoted Dexter over the holidays. Serial murderer protagonists are very Solstice!
I can’t say they made a lasting impression. Dexter is a rather defanged protagonist. The series hinges on his code of ethics, which forbids him to hurt anyone except other killers; there’s no way that code is going to be broken any time soon, because the series takes a markedly different direction if that ever happens. So no tension surrounds that particular dilemma.
Further, we don’t see Dexter being bad. We walk with him right up to his murders, and we hear his Dark Passenger urging him onward, but we fade to black before details ensue. Conversely, the efforts of the antagonists of each book are described thoroughly, which serves to make Dexter nearly cuddly in comparison.
Oh, and his sister finds out what he is by the end of the first book and yet forgives him. Still loves him, in fact. The same goes for his fiancee’s kids. It’s hard for the reader to see him as a menacing figure when nobody else does.
The writing is OK, and the stories are not uninteresting. The world is rather glossy. Hm. It’s sort of a Disney serial killer world, right down to the adorable moppets who, and I am not making this up, Dexter will be training to follow in his footsteps. Because you need cute adorable moppet sidekicks. And the rules of the world are such that there is no other option.
Yeah, they’re kind of odd books.
For a lot of pretty good reasons, I missed a lot of movies in 2007. But this is why I have a big television in my living room, no? Yes.
In no particular order:
American Gangster
Eastern Promises
Son of Rambow
Charlie Wilson’s War
Michael Clayton
I’m Not There
The Orphanage
Gone Baby Gone
Darjeeling Limited
The King of Kong
Crows 0
I left off a couple of Phillip Seymour Hoffman flicks. I don’t know. He’s always brilliant, but can you hang a movie around that every time? Oh, hell.
Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead
There.
Voting seems to have about come to a close, so let’s see what we have.
First off, I totaled up our punches throughout the course of the season — five points to the person on top, four to the #2 slot, etc., etc. Mohinder and Matt each got 4.5 points the week they were tied. The sibs each got 2 points once. Our top eight looks like this:
West (26)
Mohinder (21.5)
Bob (16)
Maya (14)
Elle (11)
Matt (10.5)
Adam (10)
Angela (10)
There’s a huge dropoff after that, so I won’t bother with anyone else. We had a lot of West and Bob hating early on; West redeemed himself a fair bit over the course of the season, and Bob became a much more interesting character. If I were doing my own season-long list, Bob would certainly drop off it.
You guys have the following top five, with a tie in the last slot:
Maya (18)
Mohinder (12)
West (8)
Peter (7)
Elle (6)
Matt (6)
Awfully similar, except no Bob hate. And we dislike West a ton more than you do. CREEPY STALKER DUDE. Oh, and Peter pretty clearly did himself no favors by hanging out with insipid Irish gangsters for half the season followed by a nice stint as Adam’s pet. But man… he was too boring to punch in the face.
Tune in next year when we do the same sort of thing!
This is the eleventh and most likely the last PITF Index for Season 2 of Heroes, the superhero TV show where punching people in the face didn’t actually happen this episode.
Face-punch count: 0. Lotta powers, though.
Not your usual PITF Index after the cut.
Everyone except Susan, who discovered Blackpool, is fired. Completely fired. A BBC mystery miniseries in which the actors periodically burst into popular song? Or, more exactly, popular song bursts onto the soundtrack and the actors sing along, like demented British karaoke? This sits right smack on my sweet spot and whispers sweet nothings into my ears. It’s the love child of Dennis Potter and, I dunno, something a lot more lighthearted than Dennis Potter.
Also, David Tennant.
Here’s David Tennant with “These Boots Are Made For Walking.” For walking! Here he is singing “Walk Tall”, along with Sarah Parrish. And David Morrissey singing “You Can Get It If You Really Want”.
This is entertainment. I have ordered the DVDs from Amazon UK.
This is the tenth PITF Index for Season 2 of Heroes, the superhero TV show where punching people in the face will last as long as someone’s writing the screenplay.
Face-punch count: 1. It might have been more but you know, it’s not like Monica’s powers could actually help her in a fight or anything. If only she’d seen some old martial arts footage… oh wait.
PITF Index after the cut.
This is the ninth PITF Index for Season 2 of Heroes, the superhero TV show where punching people in the face is the raison d’etre, full stop.
Face-punch count: 0. Apparently we’ve escalated to more serious forms of facial violence.
PITF Index after the cut.