Category Archives: Movie (Re)View

When I write about movies in any sort of light other than slight reference, you’ll probably find it here.

Write a Screen Play, A Story, A Pterodactyl

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Phteven

Phteven

Have you ever wanted to write a screenplay?  Me neither.  But if you didn’t want to write a screenplay, have you ever wanted to write a story?  How about a short story?  Essay? A Tweet? A Haiku? Nothing?  OK, this book is not for you.

I figure only a subset of humans want to tell stories that are fictional outside of the dog eating homework genre.  But if you put your mind to becoming the next Stephen King, Steven King, or Phteven King, consider checking out the book Story (amazon link).  I was listening to the Michael Hyatt podcast and he listed 10 books that were most influential to him and one of them was this book Story.  Since I subscribe to Audible I thought I’d check it out eventually (I have an ever growing wishlist over there) and what I found most fascinating is that of all the books on Michael’s list, this one was less business oriented.  Unless you’re in the business of telling stories, I guess.

The power of the book lies in how the author grabs onto the demands of a professional story teller and pushes them into the reality of the job.  And then pushes some more to get them to hone their craft.  And then pushes them some more to keep honing their craft.  He made a statement that really got my attention [paraphrased because it’s an audiobook]:

The reason Hollywood is putting out the movies with the plots that it is putting out is because this is the best writing that they can find.  They would love more and better writers.

Now, please don’t quote me on that, but that was the gist of the sentence that almost caused me to stop mid-run and post the quote to facebook.  I believe this was a jarring first point in the book to begin digging into the craft of story telling in movies (and in part other forms of story telling).

After laying down his perspective so tersely the author leans in and pushes in towards how to fix this problem.  Along the journey he points out other issues like audiences not being able to follow, authors wanting to add in irrational or unexplainable twists, and the need to write characters just the right way so that the writer doesn’t over build something that will become a distraction or leave the audience wondering why so much energy was put into someone so unimportant.

This book is a great introduction to thinking through fiction, thinking through your audience, and thinking through story quirks.  If you find the analysis of stories, the analysis of the writing, and analysis of movies interesting, you definitely need to check this out.  It’ll ruin every movie you’ll ever watch 😉

Top Five Movies I Saw At the Theater in 2009

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  1. Up – tear jerker, but brilliant
  2. Star Trek – great plot, great acting, great special effects, great Leonard Nemoy work.
  3. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatloaf – silly, but fun kids movie
  4. The Informat – This one is last place.  Don’t see it unless a moustached, fat, Matt Damon is your thing.  It is not my thing.

I haven’t seen five movies in the theater in one year in over a decade [newly wed in TX].

King Corn: A Movie You Should Watch

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Uncle Ben, in the first of the 2000’s Spiderman franchise, tells a young Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.”  Watching King Corn (website) tonight over Netflix’s instant watching service was sobering.  It isn’t the most entertaining movie you will ever watch.  Comparing it to Spiderman might be cruel because one is for fantasy and fun and the other is for education and presenting reality in a film format.  Despite my stating that it isn’t ‘fun’ to watch, you should watch it because the contents of the film are disturbing.

If you think that government spending is out of hand: watch this film.

If you think that Americans are nutritionally screwed up and need to eat better: watch this film.

If you think that you’ve got everything together and your life is all roses: watch this film.

I am allergic to corn grain and corn syrup, though corn oil does seem to be OK in moderation, and so for me corn is just not a great item to eat.  After watching how corn syrup is made, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to eat corn syrup even if I were able to eat it.  I’m convicted, once again, that I should be careful what I put into this body, but don’t take my word for it.  Watch this film, read Michael Pollard’s book “In Defense of Food” – and see where you land.  I bet it isn’t in a field of corn, or in line at McDonalds.

Indiana Jones and the Abandonment of Everything Before It

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I just got back from Indiana Jones and the Crystal Cathedral.  Great googly-moogly this was a complete re-hack of the previous movies just look at all of the similarities:

 

Raiders of the Lost Ark, Last Crusade or Temple of Doom Crystal Meth Sameness
Older Harrison Ford Younger Harrison Ford 60%
Witty lines Witty limes Fruity
Nazis Reds 100% same, only different
Wrath of God Wrath of trans-dimensional aliens 0% sameness
Double Crossing Double Crossing much sameness
Sean Connery Picture of Sean Connery 10%
Indy as Junior “Mutt” as Junior -9000%

I could go on with the similarities, but as you can see by the above chart there’s so much in common between the past Indiana Jones movies and this one that if you’ve seen the first three, this one’s a re-run.

Actually, its totally different, which was either refreshing, or not. Either way, we enjoyed the movie on an entertainment level, but were let down because we wanted to have that nostalgia come back, but instead found the difference too great to just feel like we’d come back to see another story in the same series.

Kudos to Steven Spielberg for not casting ET as one of the aliens – or having reese’s peanut butter product placements within the film.

Also Kudos for magnetic materials being attracted to the highly magnetic aliens only some of the time. It made for more suspense wondering when something would be attracted and when something would be artificially non-metal.

Also, Also Kudos for having the noise of a small class rival that of a full auditorium sound effects people, it was awesome.

Dead Man’s Chest

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Last night Jessica and I saw Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest.  Go see this movie.  It is worth seeing in the theater and it is as good or better than the first.  I can’t say that about a lot of sequels, but this one adds to the character development, has an engaging plot and includes some twists.  They’re making a third movie, and I hope it keeps going because I’m quite excited about it and I haven’t even seen the trailor 🙂

Oh, and the soundtrack rocks!  Zimmer is a brilliant composer and has quite a range.

The special effects are as amazing as we’ve come to expect in the last 10 years, and the acting, as before, is lots of fun.

Rattling My Innards

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Last night, for Jessica’s final part of her Birthday celebration we went to Rodizio in the LoDo part of Denver with our friends Craig & Krystal. It is a Brazilian grill. I have been to two of these before Rodizio, in Texas and knew that we were in for a treat. If you’ve not been to a restaurant like this before then you need to understand that this is an all you can eat food fest. This particular restaurant had various meats, seafoods and veggies that they served to some tables. Somehow our table only got meats. When you want their meat servers to bring various types of meat to your table you flip over a little wooden object that has red, yellow and green sections painted onto it. You flip this so that the green side is facing up into the air. As Craig said, this is turning on the meat spigot.

Between January and April they have ‘wild game’ feature meats. Yesterdays was Wild Boar and Rattlesnake Sausages. I had several rattlesnake sausage bit (they didn’t give you a whole sausage unless you asked for one, which is fine by me) and I quite enjoyed them. Our waiter was a young, spunky guy whose nametag read “Jeffizzle.” He had a funky liney beard. That’s the only words I can think to describe it shortly because the longer description would be a small 1/8th inch (2 millimeter) wide band that ran from his sideburns down around his chin up to the other side. Its an accent piece like a necklace, only made of hair. Yeah, it looked a wee weird.

Side Story
Craig had somehow escaped all of the noise about Brokeback Mountain in the last 4 months and found himself watch the video while exercising yesterday morning. He got 28 minutes into the film until the two men make lip contact. At which point he had to stop working out, had to go pour bleach into his eyes, and had to go find out more about the movie to see if this was just a funky one-time situation. To his dismay it was not and so he promptly wrapped up the DVD and sent it back to NetFlicks. I tell you that to tell you this. Jeffizzle was not afraid to break out into what he called his Brokeback Mountain routine when we had finally decided to turn off the meat spigot and survey the dessert options. He outlined the various options that were available for us in decadent desserts and when reaching a point in the dessert selection switched to a super accentuated ‘s’ lisp and described the dish in rather sensual terms. We chuckled and he moved on into the next item in his regular speach pattern. Craig was probably mentally having flashbacks of the morning and wanting to run for the Rockies, but restrained himself.

When it came time to pay the bill we did so with a slightly liberal tip, but one that reflected the service and the length of time we had squatted at the table [definition: squatting is sitting at a table for a particularly long time at a restaurant. This can prevent wait staff from serving other customers at that table and possibly decreasing their income from tips for the year]. As we left we hit the restrooms to do what people do there and happened to pass the waiter showing off our receipt exclaiming, “I went brokeback on another table again and look at this!”

We then strolled through part of downtown Denver to walk off some of the protein we’d glutted ourselves on. This is always fun because there are pan handlers, vagrants, other strollers and lots of carriages waiting to draw you. Lights, busses, some cars, cops and shops all looking particularly metropolitan make for a fun walk. As is always the case I ended up talking about programming practicies with Craig who patiently teaches me all about the things he learned by actually going to school for his carear path. He’s also got a lot more life experience in coding than I do so I have to say that I like to be a sponge when he shares things. Fortunately some of the things he shared with me last night were things I knew which tells me that I’m starting to have some competance in the area of coding after 5 years 🙂

We had a good time with the Kaes’, Jessica got to have a fun meal, and in the end we really enjoyed a great downtown Denver experience.

Worst Defense of Movie Theaters I’ve Read

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Mark Cuban, who is always referred to as the billionaire [apparently he doesn’t have value as a human being outside of his money to the editors of every major publication], is in charge of several media production companies. He has been pushing to get movies out on DVD at the same time they’re put on the silver screens so as to reduce piracy. The theory (that I agree with) is that if you release things to the masses in multiple formats they are less likely to steal the content from somewhere else. Wired magazine interviewed an opponent of this idea, the CEO of AMC movie theaters. In short it is the silliest defense of ‘the old way’ I’ve read yet. Sure, its possible that Wired edited the guy to look like a moron, but if you look at the text its clear that something is not right about this guy’s logic.

First he’s saying that the theaters only want to carry the best products, by which he means movies, and that Mark Cuban’s company’s movie wasn’t quality enough for his theaters. Then he’s saying that ticket sales were down last year because the quality of the movies were down. But then he sites that the quality of the movies were derided by reviewers. Does he know why there are movie reviewers out there? Because there are so many movies released that the masses have to get help to know which ones might be worth their time. If fewer movies were released, but had quality behind them, then I think folks would be inclined to go see them and reviewers would review them well because they were quality movies. You can’t seriously tell me that a movie theater that played “Kung Pow: Enter the Fist!” has discernment to say no to ‘Bubble’, Cuban’s movie [let it be known I own Kung Pow, but I consider it to be a goofy movie that few would enjoy unless theyr’e goofy like me].

In short its a political move but he’s dancing around like Mike Tyson before he bites your ear. Or in this case, your pocketbook.

The Lion, The Witch and What Not To Wear

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Sorry about that strange play on words. Actually, no, I’m not. But it was something that needed to be done. I had to figure out a good play on words to offset the mundane topic of a movie that has been heaveily hyped by the Disney people. Jessica and I broke out of the house yesterday and saw the film whilst my parents baby-sat. Wow. We got out of the house. It felt good.

The movie was great on a lot of levels, the least of which was the actual witch, who looked like the Borg queen in the Star Trek movies. Not because she was attached to all of the borg, but because the actresses looked similar to me. For some reason both acresses have a similarly machabre look, similarly have weird things sprouting from their heads, and both of them are women, which helps the whole thing go along a lot better than say comparing Aslan to Captain Picard!
The Queens of Heck

The cast did a pretty good job of presenting the characters with an added exception of the the dward who was the sled driver for the queen. He reminded me too much of Deep Roy from the Willy Wonka movie last year wherein he was the Oompa-loompas. I kept waiting for the sled driver to sing a song about Edmond being a bad boy. He didn’t.

The special effects in the movie were top notch and while I knew some things were done with CGI there was in incredible amount of energy put into not making everything feel like CGI. I highly recommend seeing this movie for its technical merits alone. The battel scene could have been compared to some of the work in Lord of the Rings, but instead I’ll say this: they did a good job of mounting the tension and having things play quite differently from Lord of the Rings: kudos to those in charge of that decision.

This was a movie worth seeing and on a scale from 1 to 62.5 I would rank it a 52.369. It had some lame parts wherein Peter has no clue how to hold a sword, but there is also a really, really good portrayal of the animals, fictional or otherwise, as being quite real and touchable. The interplay between Earth and Narnia was fantastic and I must say that I’d love to play hide-n-seek in that house if I could. I would get so lost that no sons of Adam or daughters of Eve could find me in that big place.

National Treasure

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Last night I watched National Treasure with Jessica. The movie was a light-hearted, nearly Indiana Jones-like treasure hunter journey. However, it was too light hearted and it became quite evident that the budget had dried up or the screenplay writer’s imagination had failed towards the end. The potential suspense at the end was replaced by a quick, easy-to-clean bit that left you wondering what really happened. Surely after such an adventure there would be more quality in the ending. But there wasn’t. Such is life – this is hardly a renter – save the $4.00 (or whatever your rental fee is, we use Netflix) and try something else – but if you have a choice between this and Eks vs Sever… get this.