Good. At least I know there is someone else singing the Pop hit besides Chris and I.......over and over again.

Yay - I am not alone. Madz really wants the CD now so I'll be listening to it quite a bit I'm sure.

Oh, heheh, I was referring to Watanabe in Lettters from Iwo Jima, forgetting that he was also in Memoirs of a Geisha. The latter was a frothy piece of period soap opera, so I competely forgive it for being in English. It was a confection. The war movie required much more realism.

And so...
... I don't think Marshall lacked balls at all. He (or the studio) simply knew the audience for Geisha ... quite different from the audience for a bitter war film.

I mean the characters, actually. Though I grant their reality, for purportedly being based on actual letters, the Watanabe character could hardly have been more stereotypically noble samurai, and the humble Baker similarly so for the lowly infantryman with whom the audience is meant to identify.

I don't want to insult anybody by insisting they were wrong and I am right when it comes to "better," but Flags was far more ambitious and audacious in its storytelling, and I grant it more props for perhaps falling short of a loftier goal than I do Letters for nailing a more pedestrian goal.

Which is why I can wholeheartedly recommend Flags of our Fathers (now available on DVD). It's not really a war movie, per se. It's NOT merely the American side of the battle depicted in Letters from Iwo Jima. The war scenes and battle stuff are sparing, shown fleetingly in flashback. Rather, it's the story of a happy, peppy war bonds tour, its ironies and creepiness in relation to the war it supported, and the toll both the tour and the public relations fraud of the iconic flag-raising image took on the men who participated.






.

The other night we caught the bulk of Ken Burns' piece on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The man is just a master at what he does. I can understand why people might get bored as they are definitely long winded and formulaic. But I have to admit that I'm a sucker for it. I watched the entire Civil War series when it first aired, and much of the baseball one. This one was nice because it was self-contained. A single documentary rather than a long drawn out series.

In a city on the scale of modern day New York, it's easy to overlook the Brooklyn Bridge for the truly monumental marvel that it was. Burns did a magnificent job of presenting the enormity of the project, the impact on the city (and nation), and really illustrated why the bridge was such a talked about thing.

It made me really really happy that we're planning on being in New York later this year. It also made me want to see a whole lot of movies. Both informative like this documentary as well as movies featuring New York. So, to the NY folks here, give me the short list of "must see" NY movies (preferably not ALL Woody Allen).

And, for that matter, we'll need a similar list for Chicago. Anyone?

ETA: Oh yes, the documentary also had me thinking about how pathetic SoCal is. We have zero monuments. True, public works, spectacular monuments. And don't even THINK of calling the Hollywood sign a monument.

Off the top of my head, I'd recommend:
- the Ric Burns PBS documentary on NY is great, for one
- almost any Scorsese flick (Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, After Hours etc)
- Breakfast at Tiffany's
- Rosemary's Baby
- The Hot Rock

... I'm sure there are one or two more...

I also gotta recommend the Ric Burns documentary "New York" as well. I was pretty glued to the screen throughout. It's absolutely amazing. I would go as far as to say it's a "must see" before your trip.

Netflix has it, by the way.

I have Half Nelson and Marie Antoinette sitting on the DVD player and don't have much desire to watch them any more. Weird how by the time you order it on Netflix to the time it gets to you how your mind can change.
:)

Age of Innocence
Gangs of New York (both Scorsese)
King Kong (original)
You've Got Mail
Falling in Love
Stewart Little/Stewart Little 2
Eloise at the Plaza
New York Stories (Scorsese/Allen/Coppola)
Bowery Boys
Ghostbusters

We have fancy HBO so I've been catching up on old fluff movies.

Date Movie - painfully stupid. I want those 2 hours back
Wedding Date - very cute. All things lead back to Air Supply.

Heheh, and I wondered why I even had Black Dahlia in my queue. I didn't even open it before sending it back. Primarily, though, because I'm ironically in a hurry to see Half Nelson before the Oscars on Sunday. Otherwise, it might have sat around for a few weeks before I decided I'll never have the desire to watch it.

I also hope to get Babel by Saturday. Not because I want to watch that piece of filth again (though my hating it almost ensures it will win Best Picture) ... rather because I want to demonstrate that its Oscar-nominated score is not original, but is note-for-note identical to an earlier score by the same composer. If I'm able to do the comparison, and if I'm right - - I'll try and post a link to the two identical music cues.