Motion Picture Doldrums

Aside from seeing Inception a couple of weeks ago (I seriously recommend it), there haven’t been a lot of movies I’ve been dying to see. Not just in the theatre, but in general. I’m watching perhaps two DVDs from my Zip.ca account per month, and Inception might have been the second theatre movie I’ve seen this year. I don’t think this is due to a lack of interesting movies, but more that I’m just uninterested in them of late.

When I joined Zip, I probably watched 7 or 8 movies a month. I’m pretty positive that when movies weren’t $13 per show I saw more in the theatre as well. On that note, remember when movies were $2.50 on Tuesdays? I remember seeing all kinds of crap in theatres back then: Demolition Man, Bordell of Blood, The Specialist … I’d rather eat a spoonful of broken glass than pay to see movies like that today. Theatres just aren’t impulse activities anymore. Anyway, I’m even not much of a movie downloader. For whatever reason the thought of sitting down for 90 to 120 minutes to watch a story just doesn’t grab me these days.

I hope I learn to like movie-watching again. Movies was one of the deciding factors in buying a widescreen HDTV, but the lack of movie interest has been one of the reasons I haven’t jumped on the Blu-Ray bandwagon. Well, I also don’t believe in the long-term life of Blu-Ray, but that’s another story. I rarely buy DVDs anymore either; I’ve probably added maybe one-tenth of my DVD collection in the last two years, and I haven’t been buying DVDs for much longer than the last six or seven years.

TWIG Notes XXIV

Another week without posting means another week-in-review summary of all the things I didn’t deem important during that stretch.

- I was wondering out loud the other day to my ladyfriend that there hasn’t been a distinct new genre of music for a long time. The 70s gave us disco; the 80s gave us rap; the early 90s gave us grunge; the late 90s gave us electronica (although that fizzled out pretty quickly). What’s happened since then? I can’t think of any new type of music that’s emerged to really change what people listen to. My bet for the future: country hip-hop.

- Is Jack Black funny? I honestly can’t tell.

- In the building where I work, Microsoft has opened a game development studio on one of the floors above me. In the past month or two I’ve run into probably six or seven people whom I used to work with at EA. Thankfully they’ve all been people I’m happy to run into, and it’s started to open up some more lunch-outing options too.

- Early in the week, our washing machine started leaking water, due to a cracked hose. Turns out I shouldn’t have put the dirty dishes in there when we ran out of dishwasher detergent. Who knew?

- For nearly four years I’ve had an account with Zip.ca, a DVD-by-mail service that lets you rent DVDs without late fees. Basically they send you between one and four DVDs, which you keep as long as you want, and each time you return one they send you the next one on your request list. It’s basically the Canadian version of Netflix. I haven’t used it much over the last 6 months, and have reduced my rental plan from four DVDs at a time to one, yet I still end up with a movie that sits without being watched for weeks at a time. It’s probably a good sign that I should cancel my account. For the $12 a month I could probably just get a couple of video-on-demand movies through our cable box.

- I’m starting to reconsider what my favourite season is. I usually like autumn the best, with the changing colours and still-sunny days with brisk nights, and the pumpkins and birds flying south and werewolves and all that stuff. But spring might have to replace autumn, what with the longer days and singing birds and flowers blooming.

Weekend Update/Hiatus Notice

Last night my cousin and I took in a special midnight viewing of The Big Lebowski, one of my all-time favourite movies. It was the first time I’d seen it on the big screen since its initial run (12 years ago!), and it still amazes me how with each viewing there’s verbal and visual cues that are introduced then tied in throughout the movie. It’s probably a reason why it’s such a good movie - the subtle parts are what put it beyond just a curiosity. Plus, it’s the best role John Goodman has ever played. Jeff Bridges is pretty much perfect as The Dude, too.

Friday morning I also got results from my Holter Monitor testing. The diagnosis is that I have a heart condition called a bigeminy, also knowns as Premature Ventricular Contraction. Long story short, my heart will from time to time not beat like clockwork as it should, and it’s something not terribly unusual nor is it life-threatening (unless I develop heart disease). There’s no suggested treatment, other than keeping up my magnesium, calcium, and potassium levels. It is something I ‘need to get used to’, which isn’t the easiest thing, since it is basically a pounding in my chest at random times. Well, what can you do - keep on truckin’ I suppose.

Finally, the ladyfriend and I are headed south to Seattle for a few days, to be tourists and see things like the Space Needle and the Experience Music Project, and to drink designer coffee and watch people throw fish around. Hopefully the weather there will be just like it is here (unusually warm and generally less rainy than usual). Even if it isn’t I’m sure we’ll enjoy it. Obviously this means the blog will enter another week of dormancy, followed by an explosion of new Flickr photos.

Is Sci-Fi Coming Back?

A couple of days ago I read that Disney is planning a remake of The Black Hole, the dystopian sci-fi movie from 1979 starring Anthony Perkins and Ernest Borgnine. I can’t say The Black Hole is a classic - it was pretty much forgotten among greater sci-fi movies from the mid 70s to mid80s: Tron, Blade Runner, The Terminator, The Dark Crystal, ET, Alien, Star Trek II, The Empire Strikes Back, Logan’s Run, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Soylent Green, Back to the Future … it was a golden age of science fiction that really disappeared once the 90s hit and Hollywood cut back its cocaine consumption.

Hearing that a forgotten movie that I quite liked is getting remade is kind of exciting, especially coming on the heels of the upcoming Tron sequel (The Black Hole also gave me nightmares as a kid, mostly because of its ending, depicting a robot burning in hell). It also makes me a bit wary, because I’m not sure Hollywood knows how to make good sci-fi movies anymore. The Tron sequel looks promising, from its teaser trailer, but let’s face it: the last decade has brought us three awful Star Wars movies, Terminator: Salvation, I Robot, Sunshine, and a slew of zombie movies. There’s signs of life for dark sci-fi though, with the two Disney remakes, a rumoured Logan’s Run remake, a new Predator movie, and perhaps this month’s Avatar and a couple more Star Trek movies can help put science fiction back on track. Or, maybe all these movies will come out and no one will see them because there’s no emo teenage vampires in them.

Where The Wild Things Are

Being a former food critic, I realize how subjective reviewing things can be. I may have rated a chicken club sandwich highly in the past only to be told by my peers that the sandwich was far from their favourite. What can I say? Not everyone likes the same things. And the same can be said for movies. There are motion pictures that I love and others despise (2001: A Space Odyssey, anyone?) and there are movies friends have liked that I find putrid (Gummo?). C’est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.

On the weekend the ladyfriend and I visited a cinema-house (one not showing New Moon, thank gawd) to take in Where The Wild Things Are, a Spike Lee joint Jonze movie based on the revered children’s novel. Children’s movies are probably the genre that really shouldn’t be taken too seriously when it comes to reviews: a bunch of middle-aged white guys who couldn’t hack a career as a screenwriter really have no place writing about whether a movie for young people is ‘good’. Remember, these are the people who would rather kiss the ass of Quentin Tarantino or whatever film Daniel Day Lewis chooses to act in every four years. So to see the average review score of WTWTA at 71 out of 100, a respectable but not overwhelmingly good score, you can’t really take it at face value. Take a sample of one of the worst reviews, which said “The true soulfulness of Sendak’s parable never emerges.” Seriously? One can judge the true soulfulness of a book with 10 sentences in such an absolute fashion? It’s more than a bit preposterous.

I happened to love the movie, and so did my special ladyfriend. It was touching, it ended in an unresolved manner, it never pandered to children or ‘talked down to them’. It was a movie that celebrated being a nine year old without being overly fantastic or sweet. I fully recommend seeing it, whether you remember the book or not. There’s a great article from GQ about Spike Jonze’s attempt to make the movie what it is; it’s a long read but well worth a look. In it, he says, “I didn’t set out to make a movie they could put in the children’s section. I set out to make a movie that was about being 9 years old.” In my opinion he succeeded. And I think that’s what a lot of the mediocre review(ers) failed to grasp.

Movie Time

It’s not often I get jazzed about upcoming movies (exceptions: movies starring Zooey Deschanel). And it’s not often I use a word that predates my own existence to describe looking forward to things.

However,  I am jazzed about the sequel to Tron, to be released sometime next year. Tron, for those of you who don’t remember, was made in 1982. I don’t know how old I was when I saw it - probably around age 10, and obviously on VHS - and I can’t say I was a total Tron geek. In fact I doubt anyone was, because Tron wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of science fiction, or of good storytelling. But Tron has become better with age. It was at the tail end of an era of sci-fi movies that envisioned the future in only the way the 1980s could: lots of neon colours, some gobbledy-gook about Master Control Programs and arcade games, with some weird mind-bending synthesis between man and computer. It’s the kind of sci-fi that pretty much died when the genre branched into either Aliens or Short Circuit.

Fast forward to 2008, and Disney sneaks a preview of ‘TR2N’ to the attendees. The nerd hype meter is cranked to eleven. It wasn’t until this year that Disney actually released the official teaser to the internets, now called Tron Legacy. While I don’t expect a great story from this sequel, if the movie keeps with the dark but ‘refreshed’ 80s-future art direction, I am going to go bonkers over this movie. It also appears that Tron Legacy will be shown on Imax 3D, and considering how much I liked the first 3D movie I saw, you can bet I’ll be putting on the dorky goggles for this one.