Why aren't you watching Battlestar Galactica?

Just watched the premiere.

This is the most courageous show on television. None of the networks would DREAM of doing something like this.

This show just became braver and more politically relevant than "Syriana." It makes "Good Night and Good Luck" look like fluff.

Sci Fi will replay the priemere. If you haven't been watching the show, tape it. Then go back, and watch the two seasons up to now. It won't take you very long - because you'll probably find it hard to watch only one episode at a time.

Holy frack. I can't believe they did that.

Amazing.

Pirates!

This will be short. The movie was good.

It's the best summer movie I've seen in a long time. Maybe since Jurassic Park.

Yes, it's a little too long and by the middle of the third act it starts to feel a little too, well, percussive.

But you know what it has going for it?

None of the characters - ever - do anything that makes you go, "Wow, that's stupid. He should just ..."

It's amazing how far that gets you in a pinch.

Why the first X-Men movie is still the best ...

It's about the characters, stupid.

Look. A film's only 2 hours long or so. It's not a serialized comic book which can go on for hundreds of issues. You don't have that much time on screen. So you have some choices:

Spend a lot of time with a few characters, and get to know them well.

or spend a little bit of time with a lot of characters, and don't.

X1 made its choice: this is a movie about Wolverine and Rogue. Yes, they took some story beats the comics had given to Kitty Pride and handed them to Rogue (where they work better, anyway). And you meet a bunch of other people, but it's in passing. It's abundantly clear who the leads of the story really are.

I blame the Batman franchise. In Batman 2, they gave us both Catwoman and the Penguin. Why? Why not just give us one, and really go into some depth with it? But that movie was a hit, so the trend continued. Two bad guys per movie. Plus Robin. And Batgirl. And ... the movies got worse and worse. There's a connection here.

In X2, you could star to see the conrtactual demands showing up: Rebecca Romijn's agent was smart enough to get it into her contract that she gets a scene looking like she looks in real life. Halle Berry gets foregrounded in a pair of scenes. Oh, yeah, and in addition to all the characters we met before, they introduce a slew of new ones and give them a bunch of screen time, too: Pyro and Iceman get a bunch of screen time, which means less for the characters we've grown attached to.

X3 continues the trend. Let's see, we've got an Iceman and Rogue story, a McKellan-Stewart one, Rogue-Wolverine, Wolverine-Pheonix, Storm-running-the-school, and more ... and that's before we get to the main plots (yup, there are even two of them: Phoenix's incredible powers and the battle against the anti-Mutant serum).

Some people compain (correctly) that the ending of X1 is rushed. It's a little on the cheesy side. The special effects aren't as good as the ones in the sequels. But it has something in its core that neither of the sequels have: a fundamental human story which anyone can relate to.

It's about feeling alone, and isolated, not knowing how you fit in. We feel Rogue's pain.

When X2 reaches for similar moments (most notably in the "couldn't you try not being a mutant" scene) they don't work, for two reasons: first, they don't focus on the main characters in the film, so they feel tacked on. And second, because they were tacked on, while it was easy to recognize what the filmmaker was going for ("oh, it's a coming out scene") it was something we saw, rather than felt. We recognize it, but we're seeing it from the outside. It therefore provokes a chuckle of recognition rather than a wince of shared emotion.*

X3 doesn't even try.

If there is a fourth film - and I certainly expect there will be - I hope they narrow the focus again. I know that this gets almost impossible - you're not going to get Hugh Jackman to play a supporting role or take a supporting-character's paycheck - but it sure would make for better movies. Every X-Men comic was not about every X-Man. Every movie shouldn't have to be, either.

What this is

As anybody reading this might guess from the title, this is a blog about films. Current releases. Old favorites. Trends. You name it. (Well, it's mostly that, but I figure the title gives me lattitude for the occasional political rant, too).

This is not a review site. You'll notice a lot of things that look like reviews here, but they're not. They're commentaries. A review is something written for potential viewers of a film - people who haven't seen it. A reviewer has an obligation not to spoil and key twists, because, hey, his readers haven't seen the films yet.

I'm going to spoil key twists. I'll try to warn you ... but this entry is a warning in and of itself. I'm going to talk about nuts-and-bolts stuff sometimes - the question is "does this film work?" but "why does this film work?" And you can't talk about that without talking about what it is which is working (or not).

Entires will be occasional. It's a blog. I'll write when I feel like it.

If you agree with what I'm saying, or, heck, even if you don't, feel free to chime in. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for me to find an audience.

Enjoy!

Superman

... with spoilers

The movie exceded my (modest) expectations - I think Poland's review was more or less dead on, except for this: the movie managed to work anyway.

The biggest problem I had was with Bosworth's Lois. I actually thought her performance was much, much better than I expected, but the character still didn't work.

Some of this was for the reasons others have pointed out - she's just too damn young. I never for a second bought her as a Pulitzer prize winner. She's too young and too insubstantial.

The script didn't help her out here. What's the first thing we see her doing? I think we're supposed to think she's asking a tough question. The answer (something along the lines of "that's in your press packet") however, tells us something different: she's unprepared. Her followup question about TV networks is no better - it makes her look like a ninny.

That whole sequence is the weakest part of the film. So all the power goes off everywhere, and then comes back on, and the plane is fine (um ... ok) except the countdown won't shut down? The incredibly complex, designed-to-be-easy-to-abort launch sequence won't abort? Um ... okay. Everything else works, but that. Oh, wait, and the bolts, which somehow get stuck.

... right. So everything comes back to normal 100%, except for the two systems, which fail in completely opposite ways, which would create the disater.

How stupid do they think we are?

Not as stupid as Lois, evidently. While everyone else is putting on their air masks, she's taking off her seatbelt. Why, exactly? Are we supposed to think she's helping someone? Okay, everybody who's ever taken a commercial flight can answer this question: if you have to assist someone else with their mask, do you do it before or after your own?

That being said, I actually thought Bosworth was good in the scene with Superman when the script wasn't making her act like an idiot ("Oh, I'm going someplace so dangerous i don't want to leave my son in the car ... but I'll just leave my cell phone here and NOT answer the call telling someone where I might be.") or get hit on the head.

And the first real action scene (the plane and the shuttle) never really takes off. You never feel that there's real risk.

The miraculous thing to me was that the film recovered from a really abysmal first 30 minutes or so. The imagery is iconic enough, the action scenes (that one excepted) well shot enough, the music starts swelling ... I fell for it. The movie won me over.

Routh was fine, but unspectacular - which was all that was asked of him. Spacey was good. I thought James Mardsen was an uninteresting choice. Bland. Good looking. But no attempt was made to explore what he meant to Lois: is she simply going for the most superman-like guy she can find, a convenient alpha-male type, or maybe going for the anti-superman? Any of those would have been plausible choices - but Singer & co simply didn't make a choice.

I had plausibility issues with the ending. He's so wounded he can barely stand up - but he can still lift the damn thing into the atmosphere. Granted, this is no sillier than some of the stuff in the Donner films (spinning the earth backwards, suddenly being able to teleport and project visions of himself) but seemed like a cheap way out of the nice corner the filmmakers had spent so much time painting Superman into.

I also would have liked to find a way to connect the emotional stakes with the action stakes. The first Donner film did this well with the two nuclear missles, forcing (aparrantly) Superman to make an aweful choice. In this film the emotional story and the action story never touched each other. Heck, they didn't even make eyes at each other across the room.

But the film's greatest asset is that, despite all these flaws, it basically works. It catches you up and takes you on a pretty fun ride. The parts don't really add up, but the whole is more than the sum regardless.

Shopgirl

So this is something I wrote a while ago, but since the page needs content, I might as well re-publish it.

Shopgirl is a long foul ball that goes over the fence. A few feet to the left, and it's a home run. But instead you're just down a strike in the count.

Claire Danes is good and it (and gorgeous) when she has something to do. But I felt like she was really poorly directed in this movie. She does a lot of standing around trying to emote, especially in the very slow first half. In this area, I think the LIT
comparision really does this film no favors: Scarlett Johanson is never working as hard to be still - yet - emotive as Danes does in this films first half hour. Later, given more to do, she's stronger.

I also think that the director (who's earlier movie I really liked) did a lousy job with the camera. Lots of medium shots, not a lot of expressivity. LIT is extremely (and effortlessly) poetic in comparison.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

And WTF with the ending voiceover? What are we doing in Steve Martin's head at the end of this film, rather than in hers? (It's not so much that it's his voice, mind you, it's that it's his perspective. This is her movie).

But fundamentally, the love triangle just didn't work for me here. How are we supposed to feel about Danes' and Martin's characters affair? We're told he's emotionally distant and withdrawn, but we never see or feel it. He makes mistakes, but he seems genuinely emotionally connected to her afterward, when trying to atone for it. What's the appeal of Schwartsman's character, and are we really supposed to believe that they're a proper couple at the end of the film?

A lot of that struck me as adaptation problems. I'm sure the novel makes these characters inner lives interesting, but nobody figured out how to externalize those inner lives into behavior. So instead of FEELING that Martin's character is emotionally
withdrawn, we're told it. And are we supposed to believe that the cure to all of Schartzman's character's problems was a few self-help books?

This kind of stuff is really hard to do well (and I can think of only a few movies which are really 100% successful at it) but ultimately this movie didn't work for me because I simply didn't feel any of the emotions of the characters. I want a movie to sweep me along, so I feel what the characters do, and yet here I was standing on the outside, watching.