Movie Talk
December 28, 2007
I think I may be the only person who doesn’t like dvd extras. I can honestly say I’ve only watched the extras for 1 or 2 of the dvd’s I own (and I probably own 100+.) I don’t want the bubble to burst, so to speak. I don’t want to know how things are done, I don’t want to see bloopers. Especially to movies I like. I want them to stay real in my head. I refuse to watch all of the extras for the LOTR movies, even though they are my favorite ever. The only extras in a dvd that I am interested in are added scenes. Anything else makes the movie lose its charm. But I’m nuts.
I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately. A few notable ones. I watched Pursuit of Happyness last night. This movie fit in the extremely rare category for me of a film that I think is good, and still don’t like. I thought it was well done, I just lack any desire to watch a person struggle and struggle through life. I felt like I was watching my own life. I watch movies to see new shit, stuff that I can’t experience on my own. Not to feel anxious and depressed, which is what this movie did to me. But I’m not one of those idiots that thinks whatever opinion I have is a good barometer for how good a movie is. I can tell it is a good film, it just wasn’t for me.
I also caught Vanity Fair on HBO the other night. For a movie with 2.5 hours to work with, this movie still felt totally incomplete. And not in the sense that I wanted to see more. But rather, that some of the big events, like Lady Crawley’s husband just up and leaving felt like total non sequiturs. I also didn’t understand the money troubles they had. They were immensely popular, good looking, and well connected. And had to be bailed out of several situations? This gets no explanation whatsoever. As was the case, as I said, with most of the big events in the movie. Too much jumping around. Still, I watched the whole movie and wasn’t entirely bored. Reese Witherspoon looks hotter in that movie than any I can remember, that helped.
Let’s see, I also watched Deja Vu, with Denzel. This movie was LOL funny. Any big budget film that attempts to talk about science (remember Swordfish and how they portrayed hacking) is almost always terrible at it. But this was a fun movie to watch, even though it made virtually no sense at all, I still was entertained…even if half by accident. I’m sure Jerry Bruckheimer didn’t intend to have me laughing at his explanations for how they can see 4.5 days in the past, or sending pieces of paper into the past, or Denzel getting mad and destroying a computer monitor asking if people who died the previous week are still alive or not…and eventually getting a ‘yes’ answer. Also, like all Bruckheimer films, there were tons of satisfying explosions, intense dialogue with strong orchestrated background music, and lots of eye catching gadgetry. Woo the masses Jerry!
I also caught King Kong a week or so ago. I had no idea that this was a Peter Jackson film. I thought they made a bit too much of it, but all in all, was about as good a movie about a giant gorilla in the 21st century could be. I was lucky to watch it on HBO HD, and I thought the movie was visually quite stunning. But still, quite a bit overrated. On IMDB its at 7.7 out of 10 right now. And apparently it won a lot of awards.
I call this the “Jay Z Effect.” Once you do one thing really well (in PJ’s case, Lord of the Rings) you can do a lot worse on subsequent ventures and still have people praise and adore you because your name is attached to the work. Seriously, Jay Z sucks these days. You people are brainwashed. But getting back to the movie, it was too long and too epic in style (it’s King Kong for crying out loud.) And the love between the woman and the ape, though the severest form of Stockholm sydrome ever, was just too unbelievable for me to buy into. I couldn’t care about her or the ape. Maybe I’m cold hearted, but I think the ape was a monster, and the girl an idiot. And I’m also not down with Jack Black playing serious roles. He’s a goofball.
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