Hand Coding

Connie and I figured we’d catch a movie on Sunday — easy enough, right? Well, I clicked through to movies.yahoo.com to scope out the listings for our area. I looked over each of the theaters but paid extra attention to the hanful of indie theaters in our area. And, once I scrolled down to The Angelika I noticed that The Matador was showing.

“The Matador?”, I thought to myself. “The Pierce Brosnan flick where he plays a dysfunctional hitman?” I clicked through to the link for “Matador, The” and, yeah, it looked like my memory was about right. Just to be sure, Connie and I watched the trailer and it still looked pretty good.

We headed off to the theater, bought tickets, almost bought some bottled water — except that it was $3.65/bottle — and then headed into the theater. After a few previews, the lights dimmed and the movie began. Among the first scenes features a character watching tv (as evident by the scan lines filling the frame) of a woman being sawed in half. Um, wha? To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, the thought that entered my head at that moment was “I don’t think this movie is what we think it is.”

After a quick session of telephone game-like conferring with my film-watching companions, we agreed to discretely mosey out. Obviously, there was a collision somewhere with the “Matador” namespace. At that point, we decided to stroll through the theater and find something else. We settled on Al Franken: God Spoke (trailer) which turned out better than I thought. (All the same, if you’re thinking about seeing it, it’ll probably be just as good on your CRT at home.)

Upon getting home, I thought that some detective work was in order. I mean, what happened there? I double-checked the listings at movies.yahoo.com which, sure enough, showed The Matador. And, clicking through to the info link for the movie matched up with the IMDB page for the movie we thought we were seeing. Then, I checked on The Angelika's Now Showing page and saw that they’re not showing The Matador. They’re showing some schlock entitled Matador - Viva Pedro. For sheesh. The moral of the story? If you want to see the presumably-funny Pierce Brosnan flick, I’d recommend trying a video store — it was apparently released on DVD on July 4th.

I saw Inside Man last night with some friends. I hadn’t heard much about it up to that point and I actually had to seek out the trailer to try to learn a bit about it beforehand. It scored well at Metacritic (76) and, in particular, The Onion A.V. Club and Stephanie Zacharek at Salon — two critics that I trust — liked it. Having said that, I enjoyed the movie, but it didn’t quite make sense to me at the end.

Up until the final moments of the movie, it seemed to make sense. At the end, though, I was just left asking “What just happened here?”. Fortunately, Ask MetaFilter is around for just these type of things :). I posted a question there about the movie (yes, with spoilers) and some readers have chimed in to help clear up a few things. I still don’t quite have my head wrapped around it, but I’m a little closer to understanding it than I was before.

Matt was kind enough to let me know that Robocop is showing at The Inwood at midnight tonight. And, as it’s my 8th favorite movie, I wouldn’t want to miss out on that :).

I’m guessing this isn’t the director’s cut, which is a minor disappointment, but I’m still pretty stoked about this since I’ve never seen the film on the big screen. Oh, and for any Dallasites attending, keep an eye out for some Dallas landmarks that crop in here and there, such as the interior of the Plaza of the Americas and Dallas City Hall standing in for the OCP building :).

In case you’ve been thinking about buying Weird Al’s movie UHF but hesitated due to the cost, well, now’s your chance :). I’ve discovered that DeepDiscountDVD has it for $5.99 with free shipping.

Oh, and even though their name might be a bit weird, I’ve ordered many things from DeepDiscountDVD (and their sister site DeepDiscountCD) and I've been pleased with their service.

Full disclosure: Grace Hill Media offered bloggers a free screening pass in exchange for writing an entry about Serenity; I participated in that offer.

In case you've been living under a rock, Walk the Line is the recent biopic on the country singer Johnny Cash (no, I didn’t really think of him as a “country singer”, either, but that's what I keep reading). Like most music-based movies, there's not much of a plot here — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The movie focuses of Cash’s music and, if you like that, you’ll have a good time.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Cash and what I found most fascinating about the performance he performed all the songs himself — there was no dubbing of Cash’s voice over his. If someone had mentioned that to me a month ago, before I had seen the film, that surely would have been a red flag for me since Cash has such an identifiable voice. Still, Phoenix was spot on — several times during the movie I actually closed my eyes for a few seconds and it was like I was listening to a Johnny Cash album.

Admittedly, I have little Cash experience. Sure, I’ve heard clips on tv and in other movies, but I don’t know whether I should be embarrassed that possibly the first time I heard one of his songs uninterrupted was his cover of NiN’s “Hurt”. Dont' get me wrong — I like the track; it’s just that it came out in 2003. The video creeped me out a bit, but that’s mostly because I couldn’t figure out what was going on (the plot of the music video, if you will).

Walk the Line certainly celebrates Cash’s life but it doesn't hold back from his darker times either. Possible spoilers in the rest of this paragraph — if you happen to care about the film’s plot. Among other things, his first marriage was a bit rocky and it was mostly his fault; he lashed out at his wife in anger and cheated on her as well. Then there're the pills. He became addicted to a pill-based drug of some sort (I’m not sure the drug was named) and that certainly did more harm than good, especially in terms of how his drug-induced state put strains on his personal relationships. Basically, Johnny Cash was a jerk.

All the same, Cash has a musicality that’s hard to dislike. The film never goes too many minutes without an excuse to play more of his music (and I’m ok with that). And, if there’re two things that I've realized from this film, it's that I should probably buy some of Cash’s music and it might also be worth adding a few Phoenix flicks to my Netflix queue. Much to the extent of my Cash experience, I hadn’t seen much of Phoenix until now, either (I think Gladiator was his only movie that I had seen). Oh, and I’m open to suggestions on a starter Cash.

Full disclosure: Grace Hill Media offered bloggers a free screening pass in exchange for writing an entry about Serenity; I participated in that offer.

Well, let’s get right down to it — if you liked the show, you'll love this movie. Heck, even if you’ve never seen the show, you'll probably still like this movie. Now, admittedly, I hadn't really seen the show. Firefly (on which Serenity was based) aired on Fox from 2002–2003. [Typography geek aside: Yes, that really is an en-dash there :).] Anyhow, I watched a few episodes of Firefly when it was first on the air, but I never really got into it. Mostly, it was the steampunk nature of the show that I couldn’t get past. I mean, these guys had spaceships but rode on horses once they landed on a planet? What, someone figured out the jet engine but the old rod-and-piston was too elusive for their society?

I’ not going to go into the plot too much here, for two reasons. The first of which is that any Firefly fanboys may be annoyed if I give away too much of the movie. However, secondly, and more importantly, is this: all you need to know is that there’re plenty of guns, explosions, spaceships and special effects (see also the trailer). If that sounds like it could be your kind of movie, then this is your kind of movie.

Anyhow, other than what I saw in the trailer, I didn’t know much about what to expect as I walked in — I didn’t even know any of the characters’ names. And, by any account, there are some kick-ass special effects in that trailer. All that aside, what most impressed me was the dialog in the film. And, I really have to give writer Joss Whedon credit for this (he also directed the film). I don't really want to give away the punch lines but, as a way of example, I’ve been told that it was he who wrote what may have been the best line in the X-Men movie:

[Cyclops doesn’t know if Logan’s an impostor]
Wolverine: It’s me!
Cyclops: Prove it!
Wolverine: You’re a dick.
Cyclops: Okay.

It's that kind of playful snarkiness that goes on throughout Serenity, and to great effect. Whedon also has a knack for comic relief — in some heavier scenes, he offers a respite through jesting snarktitude.

Another quality that the movie had going for it was its villain. I’m not really giving anything away to say that the guy goes unnamed, which I suppose is neither here nor there. In any case, unlike countless Bond villains, this guy isn’t crazy! Really, in an action movie, a strong villain is as important as a strong hero; and, a villain who is evil merely due to a mental imbalance just deflates the gravitas of the villain’s perspective. What's great about this flick is that the villain is driven by reason (granted, it’s faulty reasoning, but reasoning nonetheless).

Now on to the downsides, of which there’s one more significant than the other. The more significant of the two is that this movie suffers a bit from The Transporter Effect. In case you haven't seen The Transporter, it’s a movie from 2002 which prominently features driving at high speeds (a good thing). And, if that movie kept up what it was dishing out in its first third, it may have been one of my top-10 favorite movies (you may already see where this is going). However, after about that first third, The Transporter becomes more ordinary and not quite oh-that’s-awesome as the first part.

Such is the case with Serenity. If you’ve seen the trailer, almost all the cool spaceship-chases and action that you see there take place in the first third or so of the movie. Not that the last half is dry, but I was almost left wondering if Whedon cut back on his caffeine intake halfway through writing the screenplay. Another possibility which I’m not entirely discounting is that perhaps either the CG folks ran out of time in which to render scenes that may have been planned, or money with which to buy hardware to do that rendering. I have to give the CG team credit, though, for their astounding particle effects — remember that ship with the smoke pluming out of it from the trailer? That looked even better on the big screen.

There’s one other niggle which I have with the film and I’m going to be ambiguous here since I don’t want to give anything away for those who are going to see the the film. In any case, you might say that a film may embody various emotions from one scene to the next — you know, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, happiness, jealousy, love, and so on. Well, there was a certain set of two scenes where the film changed from one emotion to another emotion quickly and I thought it just didn’t work at all. The two scenes could have worked just fine if they were juxtaposed differently, but that wasn’t the case.

One last thing. This pertains mostly to the audiophile in me, but I couldn’t help but notice it — while the sound design was mostly top-notch, this film had some awful ADR in parts. In case you're not familiar with it (which isn't really surprising), automated dialog replacement is the process in films by which dialog is dubbed into the same language. So, much in the same way that an English film could be dubbed into French for French-speaking audiences, so could an English film be dubbed into English — portions of films are routinely dubbed into their original language. One common example would be outdoor scenes. Due to wind noise or other environmental noise, movie scenes filmed outdoors hardly ever have usable audio.

So, the actors re-record their lines inside a studio; those lines are then synced with the original photography so that the filmed lips match with the words recorded (and, if done right, it’s unnoticeable). The problem is with the acoustics. Just as someone's voice sounds different if you’re talking inside a library vs talking inside a warehouse, dialog-replaced audio recorded inside a studio often sounds like it was recorded in a small room (which it was) rather than (say) outside in a field. And, Serenity had a few such scenes. In some flashbacks, a group of students students are in an outdoor classroom but the dialog sounds like it was recorded in anything but an outdoor setting.

So, all of those factors together, is Serenity a good movie? Yeah, it sure is. Would I recommend seeing it? If you've seen the show, I'm sure you need no further convincing (since those that regularly watched the show are usually rabidly enthusiastic about it, not that there's anything wrong with that). But, maybe you haven't seen the show? Well, take a look at the trailers — if what you see looks like a fun time, you'll find that’s the case.

Have you seen the car flick The Transporter? In short, it’s a bit like Ronin-lite. (And, contrary to what the customers who participated Hagerty Insurance’ poll think, in my opinion Ronin is the best car movie of all time.) In any case, even though The Transporter is dumbed-down to a PG-13 rating, it makes for a decent action flick. Well, to be sure, the first third sports some amazing driving while the latter two thirds is a bit more cookie-cutter (it’s worth a rental).

Enough about the first one, though; The Transporter 2 is coming out in September and Apple has the trailer online. While it’s true that trailers can be deceptive — even Van Helsing's trailer made it look halfway bearable — I have a good feeling about this one. I mean, the John Woo allusion (which I’m not going to spoil for you here) is almost reason enough alone to put this movie on my good side ;).

On the downside, there is an overabundance of kids for a few seconds worth of the trailer; let's hope that scene is just as short in the final cut of the film. And, likewise, the “seatbelt” joke falls a bit flat (not that I expect every movie's one-liners to be zingers, but you'd think only the better lines would make it into the trailer). All the same, I’m looking forward to seeing what Metacritic has to say about it (Metacritic is a movie/film/game review aggregator, assigning a “Metascore” to each work based on the overall critical reception).

PS In case you need to take a screenshot from Quicktime but find that you're ending up that area of the image blank, you may find these video-screenshot instructions helpful, as I did.

I have an aversion to PG-13 rated action movies. Invariably, I get the sense that the director is holding back — there’s absent or rare blood on the screen, violence which moves off screen as it becomes more intense and a general lack of suspense. For example, X-Men was fine — I didn't mind seeing it once — but I would have preferred not to have spent $8 to see it in a theater. And don’t even get me started on how awesome Anakin’s lava scene in Episode III could have been with an R rating.

For many years, there was only one PG-13 action film which I thought of as worthy of repeat viewings, Goldeneye (aka Bond 17) which also happens to be my favorite Bond movie (yeah, yeah, pipe down you Connery nuts in the back — his films were good too, but they just seem a bit anachronistic to me these days). As it turns out, I joined Netflix earlier this year and I’ve recently added two other films to that list — Hellboy and one other film which I’ll get to in a moment. (Then again, is Hellboy perhaps more of a sci-fi movie or even a comic book movie than an action flick?)

The film Mr. and Mrs. Smith opened this weekend and I’ve been largely doing my best to ignore it. At first, its mere PG-13-ness put me off; soon after, the hype surrounding supposed Pitt/Jolie affair made me even less interested in the flick. However, I looked it up on IMDB and learned that Doug Liman directed it — the same guy that directed The Bourne Identity.

You may have already seen where this is going, but The Bourne Identity is the remaining item on my list of PG-13 movies that I would consider seeing multiple times. I rented it through Netflix and watched it a few weeks ago. It’s almost two hours long but I didn’t find myself checking my watch at any point during the movie. The acting was good and the action was fairly lively within the confines of its rating.

Getting back to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I realized that I couldn’t completely discount the Liman effect. Granted, not every director makes great movies every single time, but even if Mr. and Mrs. Smith was half as good as The Bourne Identity, it’d still be a fun time. I then checked Metacritic to see how critics scored it. (Metacritic, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a movie review site that publishes a “Metascore” based on an aggregate sampling of many critics’ reviews.)

I’ll concede that Mr. and Mrs. Smith didn’t actually do very well at Metacritic, at least not in the conventional sense; it got 55/100. However, among the critics that I’ve found to be reliable — and which have tastes in movies similar to mine — they mostly liked it:

• The Onion (A.V. Club) / Scott Tobias — “Rarely does a word like “deft” come to mind when viewing any film released between May and August, but Liman and company make it all look easy.”

• Film Threat / Clint Morris — “Thankfully, Liman’s film is not the equivalent of a piece of stale cheesecake — all look, no taste — because the script’s as tight as a scout-tied noose.”

• Salon.com / Stephanie Zacharek — “Some people will see “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” as cynical, but I think its heart is deeply romantic, admittedly in an anvil-on-the-head kind of way.”

I’m not saying that I’m ready to sing the praises of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But, it’s probably better than I initially thought it was — maybe even venturing into “good” territory. If nothing else, I’ll toss it into my Netflix queue if I don’t end up seeing it in theaters.

Full disclosure: Grace Hill Media offered bloggers a free screening pass in exchange for writing an entry about Kicking and Screaming; I participated in that offer.

I saw Kicking and Screaming on Tuesday night and I rather enjoyed it. In case you haven't seen the trailer — which appears to be just about everywhere these days, including as a promotional spot on my TiVo — the movie stars Will Ferrell as a reluctant soccer coach of his last-place kids’ soccer team.

It’s hard to pass up a gratis pass to a movie screening and, at the time it was offered to me, I didn’t know much about the film. Well, I knew that Will Ferrell starred in it and that it was about a kids’ soccer team. And, really, that’s all you need to know. It's a sports movie — so all the standard sports-movie clichés apply — and it’s also a father/son movie — so all those clichés apply too. Just to name a few:

• Don’t read these if you’re really scared of spoilers
• The coach of a father’s son’s soccer team drops out, so the father has to take over
• The father is pretty bad at coaching, at first, but gets much better at it with practice
• The team is a bunch of misfits in last place and, miraculously, they make it to the championship game
• And, of course, there’s the obligatory cute-kid-with-glasses for comic relief (gee, where have I seen that before?)

Having said that, though, the movie was enjoyable from start to finish. Sure, not all the jokes were home runs (or “gooooals”, I suppose) but I had some good laughs in there. In particular — and I don’t want to ruin the punchline — the scene where Will Ferrell’s character tells his son that his son’s grandfather traded to another team has a nice twist after Ferrell’s character Phil ends up getting more worked up about the situation than his son. Oh, and apparently (if my eagle eyes don’t fail me), his son Sam uses Safari for his web browsing ;).

(Minor spoilers in this paragraph.) I’d recommend the movie to just about anyone if this genre is your bag. My only gripe, I’d say, is that the flick tended to fall back on its formula towards the end. So, Phil ends up being an effective coach but he’s just too mean and he wants to win at all cost, even to the point of benching his son who isn’t one of the better players… blah. blah. blah. His son feels discouraged and doesn’t even suit-up for the final game. Of course, Phil realizes the error of his ways, emotes an apology to his son and — how convenient — Sam’s mom happened to bring along Sam’s uniform “just in case” he decided to suit-up.

All the while, though, the filmmakers are beating us over the head with the supposed compassion of the scene through the old trick of the swelling strings. And, it wasn’t just a little bit here and there — they really poured it on and I felt like I was bobbing in a swimming pool of violins, gasping for air. Really, I could have imagined any one of these quotes spurting from the from the mouth of the director as they edited that scene:

• “I’ll be honest… fellas, it was sounding great. But… I could’ve used a little more swelling strings.”

• “I got a fever! And the only prescription… is more swelling strings!”

One last thing. Maybe it was me, but it seemed like there were an inordinate number of songs within the soundtrack which were also featured in iPod commercials. The song from the new rollerskating commercial (“Feel Good Inc.” by Gorillaz)? Yeah, that’s in there. And that older one from the commercial with the hipster and the dancing posters (“Ride” by The Vines)? That too.

I signed up for Netflix earlier in the week and my first set of movies — Hero, Anchorman and Napoleon Dynamite — arrived on Friday. And, I watched them this weekend:

• Napoleon Dynamite — I hadn’t seen this one yet and felt that I couldn’t hold out for much longer as there were too many pop culture references to it among my friends that were whizzing right by me (not that I was really avoiding it in the first place). And I now know the response in case someone asks “So, you got my back and everything, right?” ;).

• Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy — This is a spoof of 70s newscasts which stars Will Ferrell and Christina Applegate. Well, that’s how the studio would bill it — to me, Fred Willard is more of a draw than Applegate these days (and I mean that as a complement to Willard). Oh, if only Willard could have had the starring role — while I think Ferrell can hilarious, he amplified the role from mere parody into caricature. I really wanted to like this one, but I didn’t really.

• Hero — This is an epic martial arts flick set in pre-unified China. As IMDB puts it, “A series of Rashomon-like flashback accounts shape the story of how one man defeated three assassins who sought to murder the most powerful warlord in pre-unified China.” Now, don’t get me wrong — the movie was beautifully shot and the martial arts were exceptional. And, the sword fight within the falling autumn leaves was stunning and has some fabulous use of color between the adversaries’ red cloaks and the falling yellow leaves. However, I ended up bored by this one; there’s a good dose of martial arts but the non-martial-arts segments just plodded along for me.

I went to the gym this afternoon and, while I was pedaling along on the elliptical machine, it occurred to me that I should check for World Rally documentaries on Netflix.com later this evening. For those who aren’t aware of it, World Rally is a driving sport where drivers don’t race on a track:

Rallying is a form of motorsports that is run over ordinary roads rather than in specialized circuits used in Formula One or off-road environment used in endurance events like Paris-Dakar. In distinction to rallycross in rallying drivers compete against the clock, not directly against the other drivers. And in distinction to rally-sprints, stages used in rallying are much longer (up to 40 to 50 km, average being 10 to 30 km) and special co-drivers are used to call pace notes. […]

Or, put another way, have you ever flipped through the channels and come across a race featuring cars which resemble the Subaru WRX and Mitsubishi Lancer Evo flying along dirt roads? That would be World Rally. In any case, I searched Netflix for “rally” and came across “World’s Greatest Rally Cars”. Well, I was pleased to find that; granted, it was from 2001, but I don’t get Speed Channel on my cable system (the only network which carries World Rally) and I was eager to find anything.

I then clicked through to the category for that disc’s genre (“Motor Sports & Biking”) to see what else I could find. There, I also found Skip Barber’s film “Going Faster”, a film about (you guessed it) how to drive faster. I already have the book by the same name and I found it very useful for improving my times in autocross. I added that to my queue — so far, so good — and Netflix presented me with a list of “Other Movies You Might Enjoy”… one of which was “Kathy Smith’s Pregnancy Workout”. Bwhah?

I suppose that Netflix’ recommendation system tries awfully hard but I guess it has an off-day every now and then ;). I’m not even really sure how it would think those two films are related. I mean, it's not that pregnant women would be autocrossing (as I would imagine that the G-forces could be disruptive to the baby). All I can figure is that a lot of guys that go autocrossing also have pregnant wives… or something?