Grief

Don't watch Hallmark's "The Russell Girl" unless you're in the mood for a serious tearjerker. Seriously. I don't know when I've seen a movie that was as much of an emotional roller coaster as this.

On the other hand, like the movie We Are Marshall, which came out in 2006 (not too long after Tommy's death), "The Russell Girl" is an awfully good look at the kinds of things that grief does to people, and the turmoil it causes in their relationships with...well, with everyone.

But don't say you weren't warned.

Beowulf? You must be joking...

Haven't been to the movies in awhile (other than taking Daniel to see BeeMovie, which he liked much more than I did). Tonight I decided I'd go see Beowulf.

What a disappointment that was. I knew going into it that it was a "motion capture animation" - they put the actors into the fancy high tech suits that track their movements, and use that as a framework to build CGI characters.

Even knowing that's what I was getting myself in for, it was still a big disappointment. All through the movie I kept thinking: Why? WHen you've got the likes of Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovitch, let us see THEM. Don't waste their talent by replacing their ever so expressive faces with animated caricatures of humanity that aren't even a tenth as expressive.

Not to mention the fact that I cringed every time I saw one of the CGI horses galloping. That was a sight to make any equestrian cry.

I just visited imdb to see what people there were saying about the movie. One statement caught my attention: I saw this movie today and every movie I've ever seen in the last 40 years now looks as quaint to me as the silent movies looked to me in my era.

You are kidding, right? I mean, granted, if you've seen nothing but Saturday Morning Cartoons, this is mighty impressive, but otherwise, if you've ever seen anything with a bit of humanity to it...

What makes it even worse is...I just went online and read a plot summary of Beowulf (the epic peom) and found that they seriously massacred the story.

I suppose that's no surprise, but it makes me wonder...why did they make this movie in the first place? :D

Television = The New Movies

The movie industry is in serious trouble. It's gradually being replaced, and most people don't even realize it.

This summer I went to the movie theater pretty much every weekend. That's quite a bit of movie-going for me. I'd get home from a week of camp, and have a day before I needed to head out again, and I never really felt like doing much "social". Sitting in a half-empty movie theater watching a movie was about the level of social involvement I craved: none of the actors ever wanted anything from me.

None of the movies I watched this summer really knocked my socks off, and some were huge disappointments.

Take the movie Transformers, for example.

This movie was such a huge disaster that it gives an entirely new meaning to the phrase "distaster movie". When I got half-way through the movie, I suddenly realized, I cared so little about any of the characters that I really couldn't have cared less how the movie ended.

I kid you not. They could have blown up all the transformers, and all the main characters, and I would have thought it was a satisfactory ending.

Who do you blame that on? Do you blame it on the actors? The script writer? The director? Maybe a little bit of each of those.

Well, yesterday I stumbled on an interview with one of the visual effects guys - an interview in which he talked about the upcoming sequel NOOOOOO! And the interview made it quite apparent that they have no idea what made the first movie so very bad. Which means they're going to make all of his mistakes all over again...

He was bragging about how the next Transformers movie is going to be more "ambitious", and here are a couple things he said:

"they're going to raise the tight-wire walker a little bit higher next time"

Here's a clue for you...the problem with the first movie was not the special effects. In fact, it would be nice if you paid as much attention to creating believable, interesting characters as you paid to having high action, clever special effects. After watching a Transformer transform in a truck for the seventeen millionth time, some of us would like to see something that makes us care about those trucks.

And here's the other comment, that just raised the goosebumps on my arm: "And so they want to really keep the characters rich"

Did you catch that? They want to keep the characters rich. Implication being...they think the characters were rich in the first place. They think they succeeded in creating deep, believable, rich characters in the first movie. So they have no intention of doing anything different in the second movie.

In other words, they're all excited about cranking out another appallingly bad movie!

The title of this post is Television = The New Movies, and I started out by saying the movie industry is in serious trouble. Let me explain what I mean by that.

For the last couple years I've been making a prediction that eventually the movie industry is going to get replaced by high quality television shows.

Why? There are a few reasons for this...

High profile, talented actors are not afraid to settle into television shows any more. In the past, the well known actors wouldn't touch a television series. Now that seems to be changing; actors who are already known to us because of movies are willing to cross the great divide and join a TV show cast.

Television shows are now able to produce an acceptable quality of visual effects within their budgets. In addition, since television has always run on a tighter budget than movies, they've never had the luxury of falling into the "Transformers" trap of thinking that their show has to be about special effects. In a television show, the special effects, no matter how good or bad, are rarely the focus of the show.

It used to be that people said "you can do more in a movie, because you have more time to develop plot, character, etc." But somewhere along the line, someone realized, in fact, that is simply not true. Because while a single television show is limited to forty-five minutes, a season can have twenty to twenty-five episodes. And if you get a writer/writers talented enough to create a single, carefully planned plotline, then you can do far more with television than you can with a movie.

Which brings me to another key point about television: talented writers are joining the shift to television, along with the talented actors. Based on what I've seen in the last year, if you want quality, you need to stay in your living room, and not head out to the movie theaters.

Television is now producing shows which have enormous plotlines, complete with all the character development and exciting plots that movies used to have, but no longer do.

When you have shows like Lost, 24 and (to a lesser degree) Smallville, on nights those shows are on, people are far more likely to sit at home and watch a set of characters they've grown to love and care about, than to spend $10 to watch a bunch of special effects and a handful of characters they don't know, and who will be in and out of their lives in less than two hours.

These shows I've mentioned (particularly Lost and 24) are essentially one enormous movie. 24 is a series in which each season is essentially an 18 hour movie with one single, carefully planned plotline. Lost still maintains a bit of the episodic quality of older television shows, but it is clear that they have a single cohesive idea and goal that is going to play itself out over several seasons. Smallville is very definitely episodic in nature, but it is clear (even though I've only watched two seasons) that with Clark and Lex starting out as good friends, the writers have some sort of long range plan to "unresolve" this complex friendship. (I think the Clark-Lex friendship is one of the things that makes this show work as well as it does - far more than the silly teen romances. We start out with the knowledge that Clark and Lex end up as arch-enemies, and we come back week after week to find out how in the world they get from where they are to where we know they'll end up)

Of course, the fact that Television is becoming the New Movies, raises an interesting question...

Is this a good thing?

The upside is that now if I want to be entertained, I don't have to spend $10.00 to go out.

The downside is that now if I want to be entertained, I don't have to spend $10.00 to go out.

Heh heh...bet you didn't see that coming. :)

Unfortunately, it is far too easy to get "addicted" to one of these television shows. And if you get addicted to many of them, you're frittering away far too much of your life in front of a television.

If you like analogies, here's one for you:

Movie is to Television as Arcade game is to X-Box.

When I was growing up, most people who wanted to play computer games had to get together a sizeable stack of quarters and take a trip to the mall. Now you don't have to even leave the comfort of your own home to waste an entire day playing games.

The entertainment industry, is making it easier and easier all the time for us to waste our lives. And that's not a good thing.

Best Movie, 2007?

Question: Is it too early in the year to declare the "Best Movie Of 2007?" Of course, I was ready to declare the worst movie of 2007 the week Pirates of the Carribean III came out, so maybe August isn't so bad. Of course, it's not like I make a habit of declaring the best and worst of any year...the last time I declared a "Best Of", it was in November of 2004, when Finding Neverland came out, and I was confident that I wasn't going to see anything else the rest of the year that would match it.

ANYWAY...if you are a fan of fantasy...you really need to see STARDUST.

And with that, I'm not going to offer a single word of explanation or comment. This movie, I think, will be best experienced without any more explanation than you get from the movie's tagline: In a countryside town bordering on a magical land, a young man makes a promise to his beloved that he'll retrieve a fallen star by venturing into the magical realm.

So there you have it. Even if it doesn't turn out to be the best of 2007, it is certainly the best I've seen so far this year!

Now, I have to make a disclaimer - there is a possibility (though I doubt it) that I will change my tune in October, when a movie titled "The Seeker" comes out. This is a Walden Media production, and I hadn't heard a word about it, until today when I saw a preview for it. So what is it? I'll tell you what it is.

It is the movie version of The Dark is Rising

I am both exhilarated and terrified by the fact that Walden Media is turning my childhood favorite fantasy series into a movie. Exhilarated because it never occurred to me that anyone would ever do this.

Terrified because, based on what I saw of the preview, I am afraid that they have butchered it. Even if they faithfully follow the book (which I'm pretty confident that they haven't), I'm so afraid that their mental image of the book won't be anything like mine.

Regardless, come October, I will be going to see this one!

Underdog, and surgery scheduled

Okay, so this afternoon I took Daniel to see Underdog. When I saw the previews for this one a few months ago, I thought "This looks pretty stupid."

Of course, stupid doesn't necessarily mean it's not funny...it's possible to be both stupid AND funny.

But the real deciding factor on whether to watch it was the imdb.com rating on the movie. Over a thousand members at imdb.com have cast their vote on "Underdog", and rated it at 3.3 out of ten.

And I thought, "If the members at imdb.com hate the movie that much, it might actually be pretty good!" :)

Daniel and I both enjoyed the movie. True, it was quite silly, and the flying dog looked quite unconvincing in the scene where he's learning to fly, but we enjoyed it.

On another subject, I'm going to have my gallbladder removed next Tuesday. Bright and early in the morning. I'm glad I decided not to go to Acadia this weekend...I'm going to be well rested on Tuesday when I go in for surgery!