Miscellaneous Movie Musings

[Pirate Bill]

Just watched Hot Rod.

The beginning was good. It slowed in the middle and picked back up at the end. Good sophomoric humor throughout. The "punch dancing" scene is so much better in the bonus material where they show the similar scene from Footloose side-by-side. Hilarious!

[€uroMeinke]

Yesterday I saw a billboard for Space Chimps - I figured it couldn't be real since no one's said anything about it here. Then I saw another billboard. So is this the second coming of Lancelot Link Secret Chimp?

[flippyshark]

alas, no link to Lancelot - Space Chimps looks like another generic talking cgi animal comedy. Yawn

I used to have a Lancelot Link lunch box, though.

[flippyshark]

Tonight's movie catch-up rental - Julie Taymor's Across The Universe. I can see why this divided critics and Beatles fans. It's kind of a mess, and its reach exceeds its grasp. But, call me a sucker, I liked it. (It reminded me an awful lot of Milos Forman's Hair, which I adore in spite of its flaws.) I wouldn't want to listen to it as a soundtrack, but in context, I enjoyed many of the visual interpretations of the songs, and even some of the painfully shoehorned numbers struck me as highly enjoyable. The cast were earnest and pleasant to listen to/ look at. I have a feeling I'll be revisiting this soon. I'll see how it holds up over the long haul.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Oooh, that's out? Time to check the queue.

Meanwhile, we followed a Netflix recommendation for a movie called Cashback.

We turned it off. It was unwatchable. Which is too bad because the premise was interesting and there was a good scene or two. But they made the decision to go with a running voice-over monologue through the whole bloody movie which they clearly thought contained brilliant prosaic writing, but was actually hackneyed over dramatic drivel.

It was especially glaringly bad having just seen WALL-E where an entire love story was told with fewer words than this amateur attempt at a movie had in any 2 minute stretch.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

It was especially glaringly bad having just seen WALL-E where an entire love story was told with fewer words than this amateur attempt at a movie had in any 2 minute stretch.

This was so horribly bad! You don't even get to meet the original love interest, it's all slow-mo flashback (running through fields, I kid you not) and he blathers on and on about how much he loves her. I didn't believe anything he said, as there was no reason to.

I was practically screaming, don't tell, SHOW! But even when they showed things happening, they also told at the same time, and the redundancy was just as bad. We gave it as long as we could stand it.

It thought it was Garden State, but it was sooooo not. And Garden State wasn't perfect, either.

[LSPoorEeyorick]

Man alive - I hated Cashback when it was just 15 minutes long (nominated for best short film live action in 2006, bleah!)

[JWBear]

We watched La Vie en Rose last night. Man, she had a rough life!

[Pirate Bill]

I've been reading The Secret History of Star Wars recently. (A free PDF download. Informative book, but very poorly written. 524 pages that could be easily cut in half with better editing.)

Anyway, the book talks about how Hidden Fortress influenced Lucas in the story and style of Star Wars. So I gave it a watch. Pretty good movie. I liked it. According to The Secret History of Star Wars, the plot and storyline of the first draft scripts of the Star Wars were taken directly from Hidden Fortress. The theatrical release of Star Wars doesn't have the same plot, but it has some similar elements that remain. What's interesting though is, from what I saw, there are even elements from Hidden Fortress that seemed to show up in Phantom Menace. The swipe cuts in all the Star Wars movies also seemed to be taken directly from Hidden Fortress.

[Ghoulish Delight]

3PO and R2 are HEAVILY ripped off from influenced by Hidden Fortress, as I recall from my viewing.