amedia

One of the weirdest movies I've ever seen, yet also very beautiful. Another movie I found through Tin Man fandom, and there were some resonances - the steampunk look-and-feel, the brain floating in a tank in green miasma, the villain who looked a lot like the head alchemist. It reminded me even more, though, of Dark City, something about the claustrophobic city setting that seemed to be constantly turning in on itself, a place where it was never light and always gloomy. We've been watching it over the last couple of days and finished most of the last hour tonight. We watched it in French with the English subtitles on.

We watched Starship Troopers 3 just before the hurricane, and When Nietzsche Wept partly before and partly after. (We actually unlocked a classroom and watched it using the projector, since we had no power at home.)

I can say two good things about Starship Troopers 3: it had Jolene Blalock, whom I enjoy watching, and it didn't suck nearly as bad as Starship Troopers 2. #2 was execrable; #3 was just crappy.

When Nietzsche Wept was excellent; it had a good handle on Nietzsche's philosophy and I was surprised to realize that Nietzsche was played by Armand Assante, who I thought was just a mini-series hunk. He was very, very good, and so was Ben Cross, who played Dr. Josef Breuer, an historical character who was a friend of Sigmund Freud and a contemporary of Nietzsche. It's based on a novel that imagines that Breuer treated Nietzsche with a kind of primitive psychotherapy, and was deeply affected by the process. I found the movie genuinely engaging and touching.

I think I may have seen this movie a long time ago, but I didn't remember it very well.

I hadn't realized the narrator was Deems Taylor! One of my favorite books when I was growing up was a collection that he edited of retellings of the Gilbert & Sullivan operas with illustrations. His introduction to "Dance of the Hours" was a masterful bit of deadpan.

I enjoyed all the sequences. Some were almost hallucinatory - the "Dance of the Hours" reminded me of nothing so much as the Heffalumps and Woozles sequence in Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day. (It also had us going, "So that's where the "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" melody comes from!") I adored the little fairies in the Nutcracker Suite, but the "My Little Pony" cuteness of the mythological sequence set to the Pastoral Symphony made it my least favorite. metherion was especially interested in the Night on Bald Mountain sequence because the demon who unfolds from the mountain is a character in Kingdom Hearts. And of course, "The Sorceror's Apprentice" is a classic! And I liked the period during the intermission when the orchestra relaxed by jamming in a jazz style.

The trailer for this martial-arts parody was laugh-out-loud, wet-your-pants hilarious.

Alas, when you take that same number of laughs and spread them out over a ninety-minute movie, it wears thin pretty quickly.

Yes, it's one of those - all the best moments were already in the trailer!

Christopher Walken seems to be having a good time, and James Hong is a hoot as the trainer. George Lopez, whom I have seen primarily as a comedian, was very solid playing mostly a straight man (I mean, the person who sets up the jokes), which I understand is much harder than being the funny one. Aisha Tyler is awfully good as a Bond-style henchwoman. The rest of the supporting cast does their best. But the actor who played the central character just wasn't that great, and the material, while sporadically brilliant, was mostly just not very funny.

But when it was funny? OMG.

Decided to rent the first one before seeing the second, the previews for which had intrigued us.

How did we miss this before? It was great fun! Imagine Lovecraft-style demon-monsters fighting a contemporary-style sarcastic-snarky superhero, with a wild over-the-top backstory, creepy human villains, all kinds of bizarre religious references (how often does Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite - whom I quoted in my dissertation - figure in a comic-book movie?!!!!). Clearly it has destroyed my ability to construct coherent syntax.

And the DVD came with three episodes of Gerald McBoing-Boing (you can see it playing on a TV at some point during the movie) and an animated version of Telltale Heart, all of which we greatly enjoyed as well!

A really unusual superhero movie and I enjoyed it a lot. It was good to see Will Smith and Charlize Theron in a movie again (I had just seen them in Bagger Vance!) There's an Easter egg a few minutes into the credits.

Non-spoilery paratextual comments: How many things can go wrong in one theater, especially with only about fifteen people total? Well... The people in front of us wouldn't turn stop checking cell-phone messages; in a dark theater, watching a dark movie, that bright square of blue light right in front of you is incredibly distracting. They ignored our whispered requests to stop, but after my SIL left to get a manager, they finally turned it off. Fortunately she didn't miss much of the movie, but she shouldn't've had to miss any! (The manager never came, but that's another story.) Then some people came in late: a mom and dad who apparently didn't want to pay a babysitter because they brought a one-year-old and a three-year-old, who babbled and talked, respectively, for quite a while; they took them out once and brought them back in, then took them out for good. Meanwhile, the movie itself was jittery; it wasn't obvious until the action slowed down, but then we could tell that the film was moving rapidly back and forth (it was painfully obvious - literally - during the credits) in the projector.

We spoke to the manager afterwards. It turned out that the usher my SIL had talked to had gotten overwhelmed by a busy period and forgot to ask the manager to check on the cellphone user. The poor kid was right there while we were talking to the manager, and looked very embarrassed, and we emphasized that we didn't want him to be reprimanded or anything. We just wanted her to know the situation, and we also told her about the shaky film (we didn't mention the little kids - didn't want to be piling on). She was very understanding and thanked us for being so polite about the whole thing, and insisted on giving us free tickets for another movie AND a complete refund. Wow! We gave the tickets to the SIL, who loves movies and has a hard time affording them.

( mildly spoilery comments )

We rented this ages ago, didn't have time to watch it, and dubbed it off onto a couple of tapes (which tells you how long ago it was!). Finally got around to watching it.
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w00t! ( possible minor spoilers )

I promised to post something about this movie when I saw it a couple of months ago, and I'm finally getting around to doing it!

This was a Japanese anime movie aimed at adults, and it was awesomely philosophical. It's about a company that uses dream-viewing technology as a kind of psychoanalytic tool, and it explores the notion of dreaming on many levels, from the actual dreams people have when they're asleep, to daydreaming/fantasizing, envisioning the future, watching movies, creating movies, visiting cyberspace, playing video games, and so on. It gracefully juggles ideas of randomness and control and plays with cosmos and chaos in an unusually creative way. I highly, highly recommend it.