10 Things I Learned from Moulin Rouge!

1. Never fall in love with a woman who sells herself. It always ends badly.
2. Girls are excited to sleep with you if your title is 'Duke.' If it's 'writer,' they are a little more hesitant.
3. You can go anywhere and do anything if you have a huge...talent.
4. One dude spontaneously singing a Madonna tune to another dude is an effective distraction.
4a. Frogs are also a useful distraction.
5. The Bohemian revolutionary lifestyle may be sinful, but it is lots of fun.
6. Singing to a girl on foggy rooftops is best when the moon is singing backup.
7. Drinking absinthe is an effective method for gathering the courage to follow your dreams.
8. Dwarfs dressed as nuns and narcoleptic Argentinians make for the best neighbors.
9. Freedom, beauty, truth, but above all things love.
10. Love may be messy, but if you can sing it will all work out.

Blade Runner Prequels and Sequels Coming

Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies of all time - of all time! - which is why I'm not really excited to see that prequels and sequels are coming. The odds of these being any good are slim. How can anyone come close to matching the movies's dark, moody cinematography, the sparse but dense script (watch the director's cut, not the original with the shoddy voice-over), and the beautiful final words of Roy Batty.



Leave well enough alone, I say. Not that Hollywood is any good at that.

Blame It On Top Gun

A case is made that Top Gun was the film that started Hollywood's downward spiral.

Then came Top Gun. The man calling the shots may have been Tony Scott, but the film's real auteurs were producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, two men who pioneered the "high-concept" blockbuster—films for which the trailer or even the tagline told the story instantly. At their most basic, their movies weren't movies; they were pure product—stitched-together amalgams of amphetamine action beats, star casting, music videos, and a diamond-hard laminate of technological adrenaline all designed to distract you from their lack of internal coherence, narrative credibility, or recognizable human qualities. They were rails of celluloid cocaine with only one goal: the transient heightening of sensation.

Top Gun landed directly in the cortexes of a generation of young moviegoers whose attention spans and narrative tastes were already being recalibrated by MTV and video games. That generation of 16-to-24-year-olds—the guys who felt the rush of Top Gun because it was custom-built to excite them—is now in its forties, exactly the age of many mid- and upper-midrange studio executives. And increasingly, it is their taste, their appetite, and the aesthetic of their late-'80s postadolescence that is shaping moviemaking. Which may be a brutally unfair generalization, but also leads to a legitimate question: Who would you rather have in charge—someone whose definition of a classic is Jaws or someone whose definition of a classic is Top Gun?

The Top Gun era sent the ambitions of those who wanted to break into the biz spiraling in a new direction. Fifteen years earlier, scores of young people headed to film schools to become directors. With the advent of the Reagan years, a more bottom-line-oriented cadre of would-be studio players was born, with an MBA as the new Hollywood calling card. The Top Gun era shifted that paradigm again—this time toward marketing. Which was only natural: If movies were now seen as packages, then the new kings of the business would be marketers, who could make the wrapping on that package look spectacular even if the contents were deficient.

The whole piece is worth reading. Hollywood is in a sad state these days, but even though the author blames Top Gun for the start of it he ultimately blames us for continuing to pay to see the shallow crap put out these days.

Memoirs of a Geisha

I finally got around to watching Memoirs of a Geisha tonight. It wasn't a bad film, but it left me with an odd feeling by the end. Am I the only one that found it strange that this movie 1) mostly romanticized this act of making women second class citizens and 2) mostly made women the bad guys when it was the patriarchal society that created geisha?

On the plus side, the cinematography was incredible and the score was beautiful.

Lost Footage From 2001 Discovered

Not the year 2001, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. As one of the greatest sci-fi flicks ever made, this is very exciting.

Speaking at a presentation of 2001 in Toronto, Trumbull and Larson talked about the footage they’d seen which they said is in “perfectly preserved” condition. And while they didn’t screen it, it’s assumed the footage contains at least some of the 19 minutes Kubrick himself cut for pacing purposes after the premiere...

Teal and Orange

A film editor complains about color in Hollywood films.

Those of you who watch a lot of Hollywood movies may have noticed a certain trend that has consumed the industry in the last few years. It is one of the most insidious and heinous practices that has ever overwhelmed the industry. Am I talking about the lack of good scripts? Do I speak of the dependency of a few mega-blockbuster hits to save the studios each year, or of the endless sequels and television retreads? No, I am talking about something much more dangerous, much deadlier to the health of cinema.

I speak of course, of THE COLOR GRADING VIRUS THAT IS TEAL & ORANGE!!!

He's got a number of screenshots to show what he's talking about. I never really noticed before, but now I won't be able to watch any movie without looking for this.

Off to the Movies

Going to see the new Star Trek film tonight with my daughters and a friend. I can't wait.

Geek Films - Star Trek and Watchmen

New information is out for two geek films coming out next year. First up - Star Trek.

A new trailer has been released.



I'm not sure what to make of the trailer. I think the film is going to look fantastic no doubt about it. As for the story and the acting, I'm still not sure. I just haven't seen enough to get a good feel for it. Part of that could be my trepidation at the whole project, but we'll see.

For more proof of how good it will look, check out the Enterprise. It's sharp, sleek, and new looking while still being true to the original design. Matt Jeffries would be proud.


Next up - Watchmen.

Another trailer has been released for this flick.

As with Star Trek, I have no doubt that this movie is going to look incredible. In fact, I am more impressed with the visuals for Watchmen than I am with Star Trek because Zak Snyder and crew seem to have managed to bring most of the visual panache of the graphic novel to the screen.

That said, I am also nervous about the script for this. Rumor has it that the ending has been tweaked. Supposedly it still has the same effect, but that the cause has been changed. I don't want to give anything away for those who have not read it (and if you haven't you really should), but suffice to say that any change in the ending risks screwing up everything that came before. We'll see.

I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high for either of these films, but you can bet I will be seeing both in theaters next year. I hope they turn out good enough to make me want to pay to see them multiple times on the big screen.

The New Indiana Jones Flick

I took my daughters and mother to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull today. Bottom line is that it was good, but disappointing. I did not let my expectations get too high, but I still left the theater thinking it could have been a lot better than it was. Spoilers will follow below, so read no further if you have not seen the movie and do not want any details revealed...




Spoilers coming! You have been warned.




There were a few things that really bugged me.

• Yeah, Indy is supposed to be one tough mother, but did they really need to have him surviving a freakin' nuclear blast by climbing into a fridge?
  
• Indy's son as Tarzan. Ugh, that was bad.
  
• The MacGuffin in this one was pretty weak, even compared to the Sankara Stones from Temple of Doom. I didn't have a problem with the aliens per se, but more with the handling of them. They revealed it too early and showed way too much of them, not to mention going into the scientific babble about "interdimensional" and such. How is that Spielberg and Lucas go from three films revolving around a mystical, unexplainable, unnatural phenomenon to pseudo-science?
  
• Karen Allen reprising the role of Marion was great except for the fact that her character was weakly written and lacked much of the spunk she had in the first.
  
• It just seemed to be lacking something.
  

It certainly was not a bad film. I'll buy it when it comes out on DVD, but I'm not going to rank it as good as Raiders or Crusade. It might not even be quite as good as Temple of Doom, although the lack of a shrieking Kate Capshaw is a huge point in its favor. It also gets points for angering the Russian Communist Party. You know a movie can't be all bad if authentic Russian Commies are up in arms about it.