70 posts tagged “movies”
I couldn't find the right movie poster, so the one to the left is for an animated feature, not for the new movie with Robert Downey Jr. As most people who have seen this have said, the movie is a very fun ride. Downey's performance made the character compelling, and the high-tech eye candy was a lot of fun.
This is an outstanding movie. The dialogue is quick, crisp, and intelligent, and is thoroughly rooted in the film noire, hardboiled-detective tradition. The fact that it's set in a high school seems to be incidental at first, and I thought that with a few change it could have been cast with adults in the 40's.
As the story continues and the viewer has buy-in, more and more humor is also included, contrasting the seriousness of the topics and the dialogue with how seriously the characters take themselves.
This is one I need to own.
Overacting, really bad stage fighting, and laughable costumes (like anything made in 1973), but you gotta love it. I borrowed this from a friend because I hadn't seen it in years and Strix had never seen it. Watching it again makes me want to read the book it was (loosely) based on, Make Room Make Room, by Harry Harrison.
Stina had never seen this, so we got it from Netflix a while back, and I'm just now getting around to blogging it. It came out in '91, and I saw it probably not to long after it first came out. It stands the test of time, and while I think it's fairly weak on plot, the characters make up for what's lacking. The special effects are still amazing, even after all these years. I mean, who doesn't like watching fire?
Okay, just me? I guess I'm a pyro at heart.
Happy Easter! This is the day that Jesus came out of his tomb on the third day, saw his shadow, and went back in, signifying that he would be able to drive all the snakes out of Ireland for at least six more weeks. I think. Well, anyway, Happy Easter.
Strix and I went to see The Bank Job the other night, which is based on a true story of a still-unsolved bank robbery in the early 70's in London.
This movie made 1970's London look a bit like Soddom and Gommorah. Someone who was actually there would have to say how accurate this was, but everyone in this movie is dirty in some way, with the robbers actually looking like innocents caught up by circumstance. Lots of plot twists and political intrigue keep this movie very interesting, and there are excellent performances by John Statham, as the leader of the gang, and David Suchet, who plays an unlikely strip-club owning, porn-movie producing criminal mixed up with dirty cops.
The robbers are brought into a plot to rob a bank by drilling up into it from underneath, where they will then have access to the safety deposit boxes. Little do they know they're being set up to retrieve and item that the government needs, and needs to get without any chance of being traced back to the robbery. Unfortunately for the robbers and the government, there are many other things that people have in their safe deposit boxes that they don't want to see the light of day.
Man, I've been busy, and now that I've started rehearsing for the next play even though the current one isn't finished, it's likely to be like that for a while.
A few nights ago, Strix and I watched Finding Neverland. Johnny Depp plays J M Barrie, the Scottish playwrite who wrote Peter Pan and - not incidentally - Dear Brutus, the play I'm in right now. Finding Neverland is supposed to be about the inspiration that lead Barrie to write Peter Pan. The beginning of the movie says, "Inspired by Actual Events," or something along those lines, and that's all you can really say, because it's not a true story.
In the movie, Barrie meets Sylvia Davies when she is already a widow, in 1903. In reality, he met them when the patriarch of the family, Arthur, was still alive, in 1897. Arthur didn't actually die until 1907. Peter Pan was already written by 1903, based somewhat on the children in the Davies family, so the fact that the movie had poor Slyvia a widow four years before her husband actually died was the screenwriter's way of making her more of a love interest for Barrie.
We put this movie at the top of our Netflix list because I was interested to learn more about Barrie since I'm in a play written by him right now. The character I play, Mr. Dearth, is semi-autobiographical, I think. Barrie's relationship with his wife, Mary Ansell, was, at least according to some, a cold and possibly even sexless marriage. Mr. Dearth is in a marriage with a wife that hates him, apparently for failing to measure up to some unspoken ideal that she had set up. Dearth is an artist, and his wife is a model, whereas Barrie was a playwrite, and his wife was an actress. Barrie and his wife were childless, a fact that he apparently regretted since he romanticized childhood so much in Peter Pan, and Dearth and his wife are likewise childless, a fact which he regrets but she does not. There are a good number of parallels.
Despite the movie's playing fast and loose with the facts, it was very entertaining to watch, and had excellent performances from Depp (of course), Kate Winslet (Sylvia Davies), and an incredibly cold and unlikable Radha Mitchell (Mary Ansell, Barrie's actress wife).
This movie can really be summed up in two words: Holy Crap.
I had seen the play once years ago, but had to leave at intermission because I was working nights and the play was very long. Of course, seeing half of the stage production cannot prepare you for this extremely bloody screen adaptation of the morbid musical known as Sweeney Todd.
Excellent performances by Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman make this very watchable, even if you do occasionally have to look away from the screen because of the buckets and buckets of blood. And oh, is there blood! You could fill a swimming pool with it, then go for a dip, the way this movie uses it. Still, if you like your darkness dark and your mobidity morbid, this is your movie. Plus, true to Tim Burton form, he made sure to spray a lot of blood directly into Johnny Depp's face.
Interesting trivia: Former Branagh-Thompson homewrecker Helena Bonham Carter is now engaged to director Tim Burton. This isn't really news, because they've apparently been engaged for six years and have had two children in the interim. So what do out-of-the-box actress Bonham Carter and creative genius Tim Burton name their first child? Billy Ray. Go irony.
In unrelated theatrical news, I auditioned for the next Theater Arts Ensemble play last night and this afternoon, and got a call today telling me that I got one of the lead roles. It's called Love, Sex, and the IRS, and it's a farcical romp and is going to require a lot more on-stage physicality and running around than I've done up to this point, to it should be interesting.
Strix had never seen this, so it ended up on our Netflix list. What a silly, campy little movie this is, very much a product of the 80's (1984, to be exact). Still, it's a fun little movie, and the plot makes more sense to me now that I'm no longer 12. And hey, Kathleen Turner actually looked good, even though even then she had that voice that made her sound like she really enjoyed cigars and whiskey.
Completely off topic, but it was snowing like mad here earlier. It was hard to even get home from rehearsal... near white-out conditions.
Come to New Mexico, they said. It's beautiful and tropical, they said. Lovely.
Good Night, and Good Luck is a the story of pioneer television journalist, Edward R. Murrow, and his revolutionary use of his medium to take on Senator Joe McCarthy. His attack on McCarthy was revolutionary for a couple of reasons.
First, and most obviously, it was revolutionary because much of the country was scared of Joe McCarthy. He was getting people detained indefinitely for supposed ties to the Communist Party without ever providing proof of those ties. This, despite the fact that whether or not they were tied to the Communist Party was irrelevant, since it wasn't and isn't illegal to be a member of the Communist Party. From his relatively unimportant position in the U.S. legislative branch, he suspended habeas corpus and held people without due process. To publicly denounce McCarthy as being more unamerican than the people he was accusing of unamerican activities was itself very dangerous and very brave.
Second, it was revolutionary because up until this point, television news had very little editorial content. The focus was on reporting the news, not interpreting it and not using it as a tool for exposing corruption within the government. Such journalism had been done in the print media, but not over the television waves.
Today, many journalists invoke the name of Edward R. Murrow, particularly when they are slandering some local government official or exposing that the local ice cream shop only puts a teaspoon and a half of peanuts on its sundaes instead of the two that it advertises. They are but pale shadows of Murrow.
They also don't know the difference between balanced journalism and editorializing. Murrow did both, but they were separate. You could tell the difference. Op Ed pieces, editorial pieces, and syndicated columns in the opinion section of the paper were always there for editorializing, for instance, but today its hard to tell the difference between the stories on the front page and the stories in the opinion section, because they are all slanted. The same goes and double for television news, with Fox News being the worst of the offenders for saying that they provide "fair and balanced" coverage while editorializing throughout every story.
Edward R. Murrow is dead. I would be interested to hear what he would have to say about the state of journalism today.
The movie was shot in black and white, and it was done with actual footage of the McCarthy hearings interspersed with movie footage of Murrow and his team preparing their stories, airing them, then talking about them at the local bar afterwards, among other things. It was shot like a documentary, and it felt like one. I absolutely loved it.
Remember, remember, the Fifth of November
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Set in the not too distant future, V for Vendetta is the story of a masked man who takes on a totalitarian regime which has taken over Britain. It is Guy Fawkes vs. 1984. It's a very powerful story, and the backstory of how the world came to be the way it is unfolds throughout. It isn't often you are brought by a story to root for the terrorist, but V does it.
The language is high, and the story makes you think. It is not a story for those who don't wish to consider that the world we live in is not as we perceive it, or to believe that we can be manipulated by those we trust to lead us in the face of national tragedy.
