Category: Movies

Over at A Small Victory, Michele has posted a couple of radio spots for the original Star Wars.

In his review of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Mark Steyn makes a gaffe:

The ordinariness of Freeman is just right for the Dent role. To see him on some dusty lunarscape is to see the essence of Douglas Adams’s paradoxical world: a vast corner of a very foreign galaxy that is forever England — or, as one book title put it, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.

But The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul is a Dirk Gently novel, not one of the five books (and one short story *) in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy.

* Of course, the short story is “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe” which is available in the anthology editions. You did know that, didn’t you?

Mark Steyn, who has a British-sounding accent, should have known better. He’s trying to pass as informed but, :: sniff ::, he is obviously not.

Like Die Hard with a kid.

If you can watch a child in a Bruce Willis movie crawling through HVAC ducts without saying, “Come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs,” well, you’re a more polite movie goer than I.

It’s different from the book by Robert Crais, but just as good. For what that’s worth.

Villain announced for ‘Spider-Man 3’: Thomas Haden Church will play unnamed nemesis.

So the studio identified the actor but has not identified the villain. Whomever the character is, undoubtedly Marvel Comics named it in one comic book or another.

I’ll take Venom in the pool, please.

In an article entitled “Twist and Shout: Readers nominate the most-idiotic-twist endings.“, Slate’s movie guy offers an editorial comment:

One thing you can say for The Village that you can’t for many of the movies with cheap reversals: !!! Whatever the film’s absurdities (the redirection of flight paths is an especial giggle), the Shyamster was trying to explore, with sympathy, the age-old difficulty of separating oneself and one’s family from a diseased society, be it crime-ridden, chaotic, and amoral or governed by rapacious, right-wing corporatists. (Well, the ultraconservative Shyamster didn’t exactly focus on the latter, but it strikes me as the bigger threat right now.) The problem with The Village is that the Shyamster bungled the suspense and couldn’t manage to come up with a cathartic payoff. Audiences felt rooked.

Dear movie guy: I don’t give a pawn what you think about politics. I clicked the article because it looked like an interesting pop culture read. Your beliefs in politics, particularly your insertion without comment or development, matter not a whit to the story you’re writing. It is gratuitous and doesn’t make me think well of you at all.

But it does put you on Eric Mink’s career path–from television critic to editor of the op-ed pages.

My wife likes musicals.

Top Secret, while it includes singing, is apparently not a musical.

If Clint Eastwood were a novelist and not someone within the movie industry, I would read his books, werd.

Damn, that Sarah was hot. For a puppet.

The night’s second Gary Cooper film, 1931’s Fighting Caravans, depicted a young (and by young, I mean a year younger than my present age) Gary Cooper as a young ne’er-do-well scout on the trail from Independence, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, as part of a large wagon train beset by Indians.

Not too many comments, but:

• Lili Damita is way hotter than Helen Hayes, and I can even forgive the French accent since she wisened up and moved to America. Also, at 5′ 3″, she seems to have a couple of inches on Ms. Hayes, using the relative Cooper scale for comparison.
• Like the cantankerous scout Bill Jackson, I too have grown quite fond of a Kickapoo girl.

Still, as I delve more into these older films, I have to admit I prefer color films to black and white, unless they’ve been lovingly restored by gentle, adulating acolyte hands. But that’s a matter of taste.

Also, I hope that I am like Gary Cooper. Although I am a stunning example of manhood in my thirties, I hope to get sexier as I near the midcentury mark and beyond. I’m still hoping to dodge the whole lung cancer thing, though.

So tonight’s first movie is the 1932 rendition of A Farewell to Arms starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. Here are my thoughts:

• Man, Helen Hayes was kinda cute, but she’s like, what, 4 foot tall?
• Good to see Gary Cooper was as cross-eyed as I am.
• You want to know a secret about the quality of DVDs you get when you buy a classic double feature for $10? Man, it’s authentic. I got every pop and his in the soundtrack in surround sound, baby. If only I had HDTV, undoubtedly it would be as pixelated as playing Doom on an Atari 2600. Which I think was called Gunfight, by the way, but that’s neither here nor there.
• Some people, particularly academics (especially those attending Colorado universities) would say that one could not truncate or chop up a Hemingway novel, but this movie indicates that you can. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s just a shell of what the book was.

  Of course, some would continue to cast aspersions on Hemingway’s novels, instead preferring the continental confuance of James Joyce. When I encounter these people, I prefer to engage them in a rigorous drunken brawl. I know that’s what Papa would have wanted.

So I pardon me if I get a little, how do you say it, upset. As some of you know, when my beautiful wife leaves town for business or biking, I take refuge in DVDs to kill the long, lonely hours without the fuego de mi corazon, la luz de vida, and the woman who represents even more foreign language sayings with more italics.

So this evening, when my beautiful wife has gone to a tropical location without me, I watch An Affair to Remember, not because I like chick flicks recommended by the Meg Ryan character in Sleepless in Seattle, but because I am researching the requisites for being a sensitive guy (please don’t beat me up, Tap City codrinkers).

Little did I know that the whole point was that the musically-minded, auburn-haired babe was travelling in a tropical location when she encountered a sharpie like Cary Grant, whom she decided that, as a non-practicing painter who could do the cha-cha and who had a grandmother in France with a good spread, was worth more than her faithful man at home. Pardon me if I take some offense.

Mr. Grant (and his sharpie ilk), I have a pen right here with which I have practiced the particular angle that I can use to drive its blue ball point through your Xyphoid Process right into the lower quadrant of your left lung, so if you even dare start circling my wife in a stairwell, prepare for your lower tracheotomy, do you know what I am saying?

Sure, the movie tried to make me forget my point by detouring into some musical sort of bits through the first part of the third act, with all those damn urchins singing, but I remained undeterred. No matter how many times they ran that damn “Affair to Remember” song through its various interpretations, I could hear nothing but “The Long Goodbye” playing on the car radio, do you get my drift?

Criminey, this brings to mind several things:

• I miss my wife.
• I should lower my caffeine intake.
• As shidoshi said, practice the upward strike by dropping rear leg and pivoting 45 degrees, blocking with left hand and jamming pen into craw with right hand.