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I’ve been doing a bit of Rankin-Bass nostalgia lately, care of Christmas TV specials. TOR put out an article today about an even earlier version of this story (in the late 60s), which reminded me of this childhood gem. It probably wouldn’t measure up today, but I was four at the time it was released, so it has a special place in my heart.
Reilly also praised low-rated Friday series Fringe, happy to not “turn our backs on genre fans.” But “the hesitation in my voice is it’s an expensive show, we lose a lot of money on the show, and at that rating on that night it’s impossible to make money, and we’re in the business of making money.” Though he said that doesn’t amount to an early cancellation, signs aren’t good. But “please don’t start the letter-writing campaign right now, I can’t take it. That’s another decision we have to make.” And again, they need to plan far enough ahead so that producers can wrap up the series if this is indeed the end.
via Fox chief ponders future of ‘Fringe,’ ‘House,’ ‘Terra Nova’.
I hope this means the letter writing campaign starts soon.
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Dec 152010
Starring Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruize;
Frankly, I find much of Tom’s work after Top Gun to be pretty fake. In retrospect, I think his work in Top Gun was pretty fake, but… it was the first thing I’d ever really paid attention to him being in. I saw him in another movie, but meh, I didn’t even know his name at the time. Still, the trailer sequence at 1:13 (see below) is pretty much the hook for me. I saw the trailer in the theatres.
Knight and Day tells the story of boy meets girl, boy kills everyone who threatens girl, boy betrays girl (or does he?) The two main characters are pretty much “night and day,” Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) is an operative (espionage/covert ops) and June (Cameron Diaz) is a car mechanic (who completely fails to sell you that she’s a tom boy, although there are plenty of sequences that try to sell it.) Some of the dialog is tragically modern (“Girl, uv got skillz” or near enough).
Others are quite appropriate to a semi-spy movie:
Roy Miller – “There are a few common DIP (dis-information protocol) keywords to listen for. Reassuring words. Words like Stabilize, Secure, Safe. If they say these words, particularly with repetition, it means they are going to kill you. Or intern you somewhere offshore for a very long time.”
It was fun, but I’m glad I waited for the 2.99$ Amazon-on-Demand rental.
This movie is probably one of the better interpretations of a book in to a movie. Quite a bit of the dialog was taken directly from the book without re-writing. It’s difficult for me to give a blow by blow accounting of the things that I loved (or even the couple of things that I thought were off from the book and shouldn’t have been changed) without spoiling the movie, and I’m not going to do that in this post.
The place where they “to be continued,” was nowhere near where I thought. It was practically at the end of the book. They also chose to re-arrange the order in which things happened for dramatic purposes.
Unfortunately, the elimination of certain key scenes from movie six (Half Blood Prince) (the flashbacks regarding Tom Riddle’s search for and eventually location of certain Hogwarts historical artifacts) make it difficult to explain some of the leaps in the story in HP7.
Ultimately, I loved it.
Oct 042010
http://www.datarave.net/zfh/2010/01/01/2010-movies-i-want-to-see/
Alice in Wonderland – the bobble head look really turned me off once I really started looking at the promotional material. Didn’t see it.
Clash of the Titans – I saw it in 3D. It was a perfect example of what a bad 3D movie looks like. It was a good action flick and the acting was decent. I think overall it was a reimagining worthy of the last movie by the same name. It had almost all of the same elements but all mixed up. However, the post-processing team didn’t really have much to work with when it came to 3D. Since the movie wasn’t filmed in 3D, all they could do is cut out pieces of the scene and make them stand out as flat images that put me in mind of the pop-up books that were out when I was a kid. I don’t regret seeing it, but I regret paying the 3D ticket premium.
Ironman 2 – missed it, was too busy getting married.
Robinhood – sort of lost track of this one. Don’t feel like I missed much.
Eclipse (Twilight) – Good. Definitely more action packed than the previous ones. I didn’t like the fact that they re-cast one of the badgirl roles. The actress may have substantially better credentials when it comes to dramatic roles, but the role played by this badgirl (Victoria, the evil vampire bent on killing Bella since book 1) was primarily action oriented. I really don’t think getting a big name for Victoria’s role was that important. She had all of 15-20 minutes of real acting on the screen.
Sorcerer’s Apprentice – Missed it and I’m disappointed that I did. Looking forward to it coming out on PPV.
Next up:
Harry Potter 7 pt 1
and
Tron: Legacy
Feb 222010
http://www.datarave.net/zfh/2010/01/01/2010-movies-i-want-to-see/
Daybreakers – Didn’t see it. Reason: reviews were poor
Book of Eli – Didn’t see it. Reason: Stephanie saw the preview and said it looked like a Post-Apocalyptic Roadhouse (and I don’t like Patrick Swayze movies)
Legion – Didn’t see it. Reason: Life interfered with seeing it while it was in the theatres (only 3 weeks till it was down to only two theatres and a total of four showings in the Bay Area)
Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief – Saw it. Review:
http://kotaku.com/5472879/percy-jackson–the-olympians-the-lightning-thief-review-a-muddled-mess
I agree overall with the Kotaku review. The movie lacked in a lot of ways, but don’t let that disuade you from seeing it in the theatre, just don’t go in with high expectations. It was certainly a fun movie. I wrote a review on AMC Entertainment (since I saw it in an AMC theatre and had purchased my tickets through their online store, they sent me “write a review” email, which I decided to fill out. Unfortunately the review only permits 750 characters, so …)
http://www.amcentertainment.com/Movies/Percy_Jackson___the_Olympians__The_Lightning_Thief/
Feb 212010
http://roxiocentral.roxio.com/enu/offers/emc/default_tivo.aspx?tla=sonic_tivo
For a limited time, Tivo users get a $30 discount on both Roxio Creator and Roxio Creator Pro. Still trying to decide if I want to buy it myself, and if so, which version.
Of course, along the way, I decided to play around with my Tivo Desktop (for the first time since I upgraded to Windows 7), only to discover that the upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 broke Tivo Desktop.
After some searching on the internet, I discovered that the fix should be to uninstall Tivo Desktop, run the Desktop Cleaning utility from Tivo, then re-install with Administrative privileges. I’ll test that and report results later.
Jan 112010
Hollywood’s burgeoning library of vampire flicks gets a bloody new addition this week with Daybreakers, a grisly horror-thriller that adds a dystopian twist to the increasingly well-worn bloodsucker mythos. If Twilight is the Romeo and Juliet of the vampire genre, Daybreakers hopes to be its Children of Men. But hope, as they say, is not a plan. Nor is it a particularly effective filmmaking technique.
Set 10 years in the future, Daybreakers envisions a world in which a nasty plague has turned all but a tiny fraction of the planet’s population into vampires. But instead of descending into the kind of violent anarchy one might expect after such a catastrophic event, folks have adjusted surprisingly well, retrofitting their lives to accommodate their vampiric needs. (Potentially fatal sunlight, for example, is avoided with an elaborate system of underground walkways and computerized sunrise alerts.)
But all is not well in the future vampire world. The supply of uninfected human blood, upon which the civilization depends to survive, is dwindling rapidly, and attempts to synthesize it, led by Ethan Hawke’s reluctant biotech researcher Edward Dalton, have thus far proved disastrously ineffective. (A side effect of the latest blood substitute, for example, is an exploding head. Ouch!)
Dressed in a drab black suit and hat, his alabaster vampire complexion rendered even more pale by his moral objection to drinking human blood (he subsists instead on vastly inferior pig blood), Hawke’s character looks something like a Hasidic heroin addict (see below). Appalled by his company’s lucrative side business of imprisoning uninfected humans in vast blood farms (akin to the warehouses of “batteries” of The Matrix), he revolts against his smoothly sinister boss (Sam Neill) and joins a rag-tag resistance group led by a homespun mercenary (Willem Dafoe) who claims to have discovered the cure to vampirism.
Aside from leads Hawke, Dafoe and Neill, Daybreakers’ primarily Australian cast (the film was shot entirely in Australia) stages a veritable tour-de-force of bad B-movie acting which, combined with the film’s occasional subpar production values, gives it the overall feel of a low-budget late-night “skinemax” flick. In lieu of gratuitous nudity, however, directors Michael and Peter Spierig substitute copious gore, piling on the bodyparts until the film devolves into a bloody, incoherent mess.
Hollywood.com rated this film 2 stars.
Needless to say, I think I might be skipping this one. Blood and gore isn’t what motivates me to see movies.
Jan 112010
While this screenplay does not match the movie exactly (I’ve read through a half dozen scenes already) it is pretty close and was probably the original screenplay written prior to the start of filming, the thing that struck me as most interesting was the fact that a 152 page screenplay script is the basis for a 2 hour and 40 minute movie. Compared to the likely size of Avatar as a work of printed fiction, 152 pages was a bit unexpected. (I don’t know much about screenplays, but I would not have thought that they would be so condensed.)
http://www.foxscreenings.com/media/pdf/JamesCameronAVATAR.pdf
The fact that scenes change only makes sense when you consider that on paper something looks like it will flow as desired, but once you actually begin to cast your characters and have them act out the parts you realize that certain scenes just won’t give you the results that were desired when the screenplay was written.
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