[This is My Blog Place Thing]: July 2015

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Watched: Ocean's Eleven

The gang. Boys being boys. Stealing things. Wooing Julia Roberts. Eating shrimp. Wearing bathrobes, track suits, or just real suits. Being devastatingly cool, for 2001. And self-referential, oh the references to star image and persona. Not like it'll be once we get to Ocean's Thirteen, but... the tracks are being laid.

It sure is pretty, though.

Watched: Ex Machina

Intense, thoughtful, well-paced, beautifully filmed, sparse and foreboding without being bleak or dreary. Just a great little science fiction movie. Good performances. Good use of CGI. Good movie.

Watched: Now You See Me

Yeah, it's all good and fun, but... this. Sorry, I know that's lazy but honestly. All of this.

Oh Melanie Laurent, you are so pretty and so much better than playing the love interest/skeptical but honest cop in this kind of movie.

Watched: Hercules

Hercules (2014). Not to be confused with The Legend of Hercules (2014, starring Kellan Lutz as Kellan Lutz playing Hercules, what a buffoon), any of the Italian Hercules movies from the 50's/60's, Hercules in New York (1970), with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hercules (1983) and its sequel The Adventures of Hercules (1985) with Lou Ferrigno as the title character, Hercules (1997), American animated feature, Little Hercules (2009), Immortals (2011) or Hercules Reborn (2014). THREE HERCULES MOVIES in 2014 alone. Before that, he'd popped up here and there, definitely in sword-and-sandals fare, but hadn't really had his own thing since the Lou Ferrigno/Shwarzenegger thing in the 70's/80's or the Italian films, most of which were apparently not even about Hercules but were simply recut and dubbed so as to pretend that they were.

Anyway. All of this is to say: popular character. Been done before. So what is Brett "I-excel-at-mediocrity" Ratner's take? Hercules is not actually the hero or the son of a god, just a leader of a rag-tag band of do-gooders that includes Al Swearengen (I MISS YOU DEADWOOD COME BACK TO US) and an ersatz Nicole Kidman. Which is all well and good, except this movie reminds me of some other recent contributions in that it cant stick to that only-reality promise (Troy, anyone?), because at the end The Rock (sorry, no, not Hercules, I love you Dwayne The Rock Johnson because you are charming and lovable and very handsome but you are still just Dwayne the Rock Johnson wearing a lion hoodie) displays what is clearly greater-than-human strength to escape his bonds and save the day. So.... what? He's just really strong sometimes? Is that what we're going with? JUST COMMIT TO SOMETHING BRETT RATNER! Just... commit to stopping. Please. I've already committed myself to never forgiving you for X-Men III, the least you could do is commit to not making any more tepid, bullshit by-the-numbers action garbage. And if you really feel you must, don't take Dwayne the Rock Johnson down with you. I love that guy.

Okay, sit down Joseph Fiennes.

UGH.

Watched: Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"Now, I've noticed a tendency for this programme to get rather silly. Now I do my best to keep things moving along, but I'm not having things getting silly. Those two last sketches I did got very silly indeed, and that last one about the bed was even sillier. Now, nobody likes a good laugh more than I do... except perhaps my wife and some of her friends... oh yes and Captain Johnston. Come to think of it most people likes a good laugh more than I do. But that's beside the point. Now, let's have a good clean healthy outdoor sketch. Get some air into your lungs. Ten, nine, eight and all that. "

A very silly movie, indeed.

Watched: WarGames

Uh, yeah, this is just a cute little romantic comedy/coming of age/thermonuclear war drama/break in to the government heist thriller kind of thing. No, really, it's fine, for what it is. It's simplistic and silly and takes just a little bit too long getting started considering the proceedings. This came out in '83 and Ferris Bueller's Day Off came out in '86, and either somewhere in the interim Matthew Broderick learned a bit more about acting or my memory is white-washing how good he is in the latter film, because he is not great in this. Not terrible, for playing a teen, and maybe it's just that the very boiled-down script is not serving him anything to work with, but he is definitely not great. Ally Sheedy is barely given anything to do, and what she does do is incredibly annoying. Also, I laughed out loud and rewound this moment twice, because at one point early on in the film she and Broderick are looking through archival footage to find an image of the scientist who has created the machine that they are now playing the war game against (WOPR, yuck, movie, get a grip) and when they see footage of him Ferris goes, "WOW!" and Sheedy goes, "He's AMAZING looking!!"

Wait, what? No he's not. He looks like a spindly 'that guy' actor, like Bruce Dern and Basil Rathbone had a love child who mated with Michael Bay to produce this actor. He in no way looks amazing, and furthermore, I'm not entirely certain I even understand what that MEANS. Is that good? Is that bad? Arguably, Joseph Merrick was amazing looking. So is Jocelyn Wildenstein. And Tom Hiddleston, I think he's pretty amazing looking too. But that's a weird adjective to choose, but it doesn't immediately connote positive or negative things. It's just like, wow, it's the amazing Professor Falken! But amazing in what way, screenwriters Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes, amazing in what way?!

Gripes with that one particularly strange and unnatural piece of dialogue aside, this movie clocks in at almost 2 hours which feels unnecessary for a movie about a teenager "hacker" (before that term was en vogue, apparently) starts a war game that ALMOST leads to a US-Soviet atomic war situation. Especially considering how pat the ending is. We probably didn't need the 5 minutes of Falken chasing the dumb kids around in a field because they think it's the police coming for them and they can't find a single damned place to hide because it's a FIELD, before he finally lands and they realize it's him. And we probably didn't need the prolonged close-up of Ferris's dad's corn-buttering technique, followed by the dialogue in which the mother informs her husband that the corn is raw because it's a better source of vitamins and he asks if they can take a pill and cook the corn. I'm not saying that little tangent wasn't kind of fun, but... it was not that fun.

Look at the baby Michael Madsen in the opening of the film!

UGH.

They use this shot about 4 times, any time something is happening with the computer game they cut back to this so that we know that the computer is working away! Business as usual!