Best Cousin's Movie

My cousin Dan made this little movie called "Till Death Do Us Part" for an Apple movie-making contest.


It's a pretty likable piece of work and I recommend watching it. Let me tell you now that it's not like one of those movies where everyone thinks they're funny and just wears a silly costume and the sound is bad. This movie has acting and cinematography and you can understand what the people are saying. After watching it, I recommend voting for it. Because that's the point of contests, to get votes.

I AM THE LINK TO "TILL DEATH DO US PART"

PS Do not confuse this movie with the Mulcock production of a similar movie. This is not a horror movie.

Best Prediction of the Obvious

This is the movie that everyone will be talking about.

Juno.

Best Wait Well Worth It

Remember how I couldn't wait to see King of Kong?


Well, I saw it with a bunch of friends Saturday night and it was just as awesome as I had hoped. Perhaps even more? Two men fighting to own the World Donkey Kong Record, villainy, nobility...this movie had it all. What a perfect subject for a documentary, and now I hear the director is thinking of making it into a feature film? Sounds great, just as long as they don't cast Will Farrell and Ben Stiller in the leads.

You've got to run out and see this movie when it comes to your neighborhood. The twists to the plot and the suspense and the gaming and all the different characters...it was too much...a few times I had to make punching and choking gestures at the screen I hated some of these people so much. Others, however, I loved. Does anyone have Steve Wiebe's address? I want to send him a letter.

And even though he's such a bad guy, I also think Billy Mitchell is pretty awesome.

His one pal, though, at the arcade. The one that kept talking about the kill screen? He's the worst one.

UPDATE Just learned that the producer of King of Kong also produced New York Doll. It all makes so much sense!

Best Chuckles of the Summer

Man, Friday night I saw the Simpsons movie and I just chuckled and chuckled (perhaps even giggled?) the whole time through. It was great and made me almost want to start watching it every week again. Instead I'll probably just wait for another good Simpsons movie to be made.

ALSO Dave's got his Daft Punk report up now, check it out!

Best "Book" of Tuesday

My second Utah Read: The Darjeeling Limited Script. (No Spoilers!!)


I wonder what it’d be like to read a Wes Andersen script without being familiar with Wes Andersen films? You probably would read it and think “Why is everything in this retarded?” The Darjeeling Limited is, of course, ripe with Andersen’s typical affectations. And they are enjoyable, until you’ve had enough of the affectations and just wish everything didn’t have to be so deranged.

I know there are differences between the script I read and the movie that will be coming out in a few months because I’ve seen the trailer and it had things that the script didn’t AND the character of Peter (Adrian Brody) is described as having blond hair, which Mr. Brody does not have, so I wonder who was going to play him in the first place? Anyway, the best news I can give is that Owen Wilson’s character of Francis is very much a Dignan and that the script starts good. It sort of weighed me down by the end and left me thinking “Boy, Mr. Andersen loves family reconciliation tales.” But I can conceive of the pages I read being turned into a pretty likeable movie.

Best What I Was Trying to Just Keep to Myself

So a mysterious commenter known to me only as "M" left a comment re:Transformers under my Die Hard post that I couldn't ignore. Please don't consider this post an argument with M but more an airing of grievances I had with the film that were perfectly drawn out by his or her comment.

>brigham, clearly you were not in the proper frame of mind while watching this movie. you >went in as a jaded law grad.

I'll address this again in my last point, but really, I couldn't have gone in with a better frame of mind. I was the guy at dinners yelling at Collin not to be apprehensive about this movie, to just embrace the fact that we were getting a giant transforming robot movie and be grateful about it. And law school may have left me jaded in a number of areas (say, towards the law?) BUT it in no way diminished my ability to embrace the imaginative or fantastic. If anything, it made me hungrier for it. Last summer, as I was studying for the bar (not so different from this year, really) I set down my books for a minute and went and saw Superman Returns. I LOVED it. Loved it.

>just think back to when you were 14. this would have been the coolest movie you'd >ever seen. (except for star wars of course).

Going back to my formative years, the time when I was forming the fascinations that would stick with me throughout my life, Transformers are/were probably the universe that most closely approached my love for and obsession with Star Wars. Anything with an excess of back story to familiarize myself with and a wide (if not enormous) number of characters to know the names, functions, strengths, and weaknesses of appealed to me greatly. And this information hasn't left me. Sit in on a conversation with me, and when someone is saying "You know, I always liked the Lamborghini...err, what was he called?" I'm the one interjecting before the question is done with "You mean Sideswipe or Sunstreak? One's red, the other's yellow. I liked Sideswipe better." And while I haven't been maintaining a website dedicated to the Transformers since 1995, collected any of their new comics, or played with any since grade school, my heart stays true. In spite of all my love for the Transformers of my younger years, I was totally cool with the fact that the Transformers in this movie would look different than their previous incarnations and whatnot. I even understand how things like money make it necessary for them to all be GM cars. (Yet I cannot accept Jazz, who was a Porsche before, as a Pontiac Solstice, which costs only about $23,000 and goes from 0 to 60 in 7.5 seconds) And the 14 year old me would have been accepting of these sorts of things too, I bet. BUT certain things that were very, very wrong with this movie would still have bugged me back then. In fact, I pretty much have no complaint with the awesomeness of many of the action scenes (except that, eventually, I couldn't tell anyone apart or understand who was doing what and why). A main problem was that the humans were all so campy, if brainless. I just can't understand how I'm supposed to relate to this movie any more than I do an episode of the old Batman TV show with Sam's parents, Bernie Mac, Anthony Andersen, or John Turtoro acting like they did. I would say it was like a cartoon except for that it wasn't. The Transformers cartoon was more realistic than this movie, the humans acted like people, and most importantly, the robots had dignity and character. Optimus Prime was probably one of the most noble and inspiring heroes of my youth, full of dignity and wisdom. And it was definitely a big plus that his original voice actor returned for this movie, but, ugh, I hate to say it, the Optimus of this movie was not the Optimus of my youth. First, old Optimus wouldn't say "My bad." Second, dude just went on and on with his grand and sweeping monologues. But he sounded more like a robot GA than a hero or leader. Plus, could he have seemed any more nonchalant about the dead Autobot at the end of the movie? (I'm going to be only slightly spoilerish here) "We'll, we've lost an ally [a piece of whom I'm holding casually in each of my hands here] but we've gained some new allies..." Dude, oldschool Optimus would have been a lot more upset about his friend. And we would have been a lot more upset, too. Sure, for a 1/2 a second I was like "Whoah, did Megatron really just rip that one in half?" and that was it. That is NOT how I felt when Autobot after Autobot got shot through the chest in the Tranformers animated movie.

>yes, the high school love interest looked 25.

No, she looked like a prostitute.

And if Shia was going to live in the same house as he did in Disturbia, they should have used the same neighbor. I think the 45 minutes or so we spent on the "human story" between the Qatar attack and Barricade vs. Bumblebee was so insultingly insulting to my not-too-easily insulted intelligence that I was feeling a little too sour to embrace the action when it finally arrived. It's like if you give me a first course covered in hairs I'm not going to be excited when the main dish arrives.

>yes, the autobots are so ridiculously naive and dumb that it's hard to believe they lasted this >long against megatron.

I did most of my venting on this matter in my second paragraph, but let me take the opportunity to remind you that, if you go to see Transformers, you'll get to see Bumblebee urinate all over a Federal Agent. But I'm also upset about the Decepticons. So they were really all just sitting around in parking lots, waiting for Star Scream and the Boom Box (Frenzy, apparently) to rescue Megatron? I wish they had hung out more, planned and conspired. Just because Megatron tells Star Scream that he's disappointed in him doesn't mean their old tet a tet from the cartoon is back. Show us some scheming by Star Scream, so whining. They had character in each episode of a 30 minute cartoon from the 80's, so why don't they in a big huge summer movie from the 00's?

>but i'll bet you laughed when Drive by the Cars started playing.

Actually, I don't know that song. But I do know the significance of "freedom is the right of all sentient beings" and "one shall stand and one shall fall" (I'll admit that line gave me goosebumps)

>i think everyone should see it. it was fun to suspend disbelief (and maturity) for a few brief >hours and remember what it was like to be young, simplistic, and idealistic.

If I know how to do anything, it's suspend my disbelief. Ask Emily Asplund or Cassian, they'll testify that, to their frustration, I've stubbornly stood by many an unpopular blockbuster (Phantom Menace? Daredevil? Superman Returns? Loved 'em.) Suspension of my disbelief is why I can now say that, yes, I loved Live Free or Die Hard and, yes, you know what, I liked Spider-Man 3, and, as a matter of fact, I don't think I'm mad at Pirates 3 either. But what I can't suspend is my feeling that I'm being treated like an idiot OR my feeling that something is just plain lousy--and those are the feelings that Transformers gave me. Maybe some would accuse me of coming into this movie with my hopes too high or too much emotional investment in the material that inspired this film. All I can say in my defense was that I didn't go in expecting an masterpiece and I was ready to allow for liberties to be taken...but seriously, this was just not a well made movie. I don't know if it was even a movie. I was thinking about when the humans were trying to keep little robot Frenzy out of that one room inside Hoover Dam and how I didn't care in the least bit whether or not he broke in or not or if someone hit him with their gun or not. This scene could have been the reincarnation of the scene from Jurassic Park where the two kids are hiding from the Velociraptors in the kitchen. Do you remember that scene? Do you remember how afraid you were for those kids and how scared you were of those rotten dinosaurs? It was exciting! It was emotional! And Jurassic Park wasn't high art and certainly didn't contain a premise any more realistic than this movie did. And I think about Sam's relationship with Bumblebee, I had heard this movie was supposed to be about "a boy and his car" but consider the sequences where he's chasing after Bumblebee only to catch him transformed and beaming his signal into space or when he's acquainting himself with robot Bumblebee after the fight with Barricade. Do these scenes contain, like, a millionth of the charm, heart, or magic from similar sequences in the Iron Giant or E.T.? Those are movies for the young, simplistic, and idealistic. There was nothing idealistic about this movie. At best it was empty, at worst, mean-spirited and gross. And it contained enough unexpected references to adult material and lingering looks at that girl to render it not quite family friendly. Are you ready to explain Sam's conversation (you know, about "Sam's Happy Time") with his parents in his bedroom to a 7 year old?

PLUS, must I remind everyone, Bumblebee urinates on a federal agent. But I can't remember if that was before or after the Autobots forced him to strip down to his underwear.

AND I swear, if there's a whole lot of hacking or a "Best Hacker in the World" in Bourne Ultimatum I am walking out.

BUT these things I did like: when Barricade was going after Bumblebee and transformed back into a car AND Starscream's mid-air battle with the other jets. But by the end there, the action sequences had become such confusing, shambling affairs I could barely tell what was going on or who was hitting whom. If Optimus Prime weren't blue I wouldn't have known he was hanging from Megatron.

Best Praising Highly

This one, however, I stand behind. It has a much better world's best hacker. And it tickled Collin the whole way through.

Best Biting of My Tongue

(shakes his head)

I mean, really.

Oh man. This movie is going to be great!

Best I Knew I Was Right

I had been thinking that the impending success of the Tranformers movie would set off a scramble to produce more movies based on toys/cartoons from the 80's and now word is out that Warner Brothers has optioned a Thundercats script. While I did watch the cartoon fairly regularly and had their lunchbox and got my friend John a Panthro figure for his birthday (and my sisters a Snarf figure for Christmas) I can't say the Thundercats hold a place in my heart at all like GI Joe and the Transformers do. (And I can't really say I'd be as excited to see a GI Joe movie as I am to see this Transformers movie). Still, it will be interesting to see if this movie gets made.

Here is the aintitcool article that I just read on the matter.

ALSO, in case you haven't been reading all the comments around here, it turns out that if you blog about Clark and Michael then they will find out about it and link to your post on their website and all of a sudden you've got traffic again.

Best Creepiness

Have you seen the picture of the Joker from the Dark Knight (the Batman Begins sequel) that was released this weekend? Oh man. It's spooky, like a John Wayne Gacy clown painting come to life. I'm guessing Nolan is going to give us a very scary, very twisted Joker. How predictable.

Here's a link to the Joker picture, I'm not going to post it out here because it is, as I said, creepy.

You know, I remember liking Batman Begins but have never felt inclined to see it again. I mostly remember seeing a lot of the color brown.

Oh, wait, I did some searching and here's what I wrote about Batman Begins when I saw it:

And Last night I finally saw Batman Begins. Not so bad, really. So different from the other Batman movies (especially the first one) in that it didn't seem to contain any moments that junior high boys would be going "Oh man! And remember when Batman did This? Or when he did That?" Compared to the Joker being pulled from a helicopter by a gargoyle tied to his leg, the dispatching of this film's villains is quite underwhelming. So not your typical comic book movie that it could have been called Law and Order: Gotham Superhero Unit. Yet, like the original Batman, Batman Begins did contain lousy "I've got to get one of those!" sorts of lines.

And it was just weird when he'd lie down to drive the Batmobile. Reminded me a little of Condorman, but not enough.

(Original post.)

Best Birthday

Monday night. My birthday. For real. What did I do? Oh, Michelle took me to the premiere of Spider-Man 3 in Queens, that's all. Black carpet, celebrities, executives, rabid fans. No big deal.


This is the black carpet area. Black carpet? Yes. You see, since Spider-Man changes from a red costume to a black one in this movie, they celebrated with a black carpet instead of a red one. Anyway. The black carpet. It was really, really long and there were lots and lots of people there to see who'd be walking down it.


Ticket holders like ourselves got to stand in this other, equally enormous line to get in through a different entrance. At first we were like "how in the world are all these people going to fit in one movie theater?" But, duh, we weren't all going to fit in one movie theater. We were going to fit in every single theater at the cineplex!


Inside the theater our cameras and cellphones were efficiently taken from us and bagged. There was free popcorn and beverages and assigned seats and all the theater workers were very friendly and excited (I guess they don't get too many huge premieres in Astoria). Before the movie started I saw the man who played the thug that killed Uncle Ben in the first movie, Uncle Ben (who looked incredibly old in real life), Bill Paxton and his Dad (his Dad plays Harry Osborn's butler), and Professor Connors (you know, Peter's one armed scientist friend).

Then, at about 8:32 (just an hour after the advertised start time) the lights in our theater dimmed and the movie began. With all the excitement of being there, it was easy to forget that we were getting a movie too. At the end of this post you'll find my completely spoiler-free review of the film.

After the movie our phones and cameras were efficiently returned to us (in what was really a marvel of efficiency, really). Before getting my camera back we saw James Franco (Harry Osborn), Topher Grace (Eddie Brock), James Cromwell (who plays Captain Stacy), and Aunt May.

The black carpet, post-chaos.


We caught director Sam Raimi signing autographs outside, making this my almost-only "celebrity" photo of the night.


Our tickets didn't include invitations to the afterparty, but we walked by it on the way home.


Outside the party we saw James Cromwell with the Paxtons, making this my other celebrity photo of the night.


In short, it was a very awesome way to celebrate my birthday and an experience that will be difficult to top.

And now, my brief, spoiler-free thoughts on Spider-Man 3:

First, Spider-Man 3 is good. I think Spider-Man 2 was better, but Spider-Man 3 is definitely not a disappointment.

Second, I know concern exists over the fact that the movie features three villains, new supporting cast members, and the introduction of Spider-Man's black suit. Doesn't this all stretch the movie too thin? No. Although there were times that I wondered if the movie was going to spiral out of control, it all comes together by the end.

Some thoughts on the cast, characters, and other stuff:

Peter Parker--With the addition of his black suit, Peter steps into some Anakin Skywalker territory, so this movie is like what if Anakin eventually made the right decisions and didn't join the dark side. Still, the movie is nearly ridiculous when it shows what it means to be a "bad" Peter Parker. You know, making girls bake you cookies, acting like Ron Burgundy in a jazz club.

Sandman--I really didn't know how they were going to handle this character and had wondered why they even picked him for the movie but Thomas Haden Church does a great job (like, a really great job) playing him and his role and importance become clear.

Harry Osborn--Probably my favorite character in the movie? For a while things are good between Peter and Harry and Mary Jane in the movie and, for the first time in the three movies, Harry is really likable (and funny) and you can see why he and Peter were/are best friends.

Harry's Butler--I don't even remember if he was in the other movies, but I liked him in this one.

Stan Lee--Just when you thought you were tired of him popping up in all the Marvel movies he drops his best cameo yet. There were cheers in the audience.

Eddie Brock--Andy from the Office and what would happen if he hadn't gone to anger management. This movie wasn't so much about its villains. Sure, they were there and they were important, but it wasn't just a movie about "Oh no, will Spider-Man save the day?" UPDATE Also, keep your eyes peeled for when Brock pulls out the same Leica as I've got.

The Action Sequences--Quite harrowing, even more acrobatic and intense than before. It's like they've got a brain trust working on these action sequences nonstop so that you'll never get tired of what one fellow can do when swinging from building to building.

I could probably go on for far too long. But it's a movie you should be excited to see and I look forward to seeing it a second time (which would be: Saturday morning at 10 at the IMAX by Lincoln Center with 1/2 the people who read this blog).

Best "Wait . . . really?"

Indiana Jones 4 has a release date? And it's May 22, 2008?

Other May 2008 Movies:
Iron Man, May 2
Speed Racer, May 9
Prince Caspian, May 16
The Day the Earth Stood Still, May 22

That's a pretty intense month right there. What will we have to watch in June?
(I just checked: Kung Fu Panda, Get Smart, The Incredible Hulk, Wall-E, and the Dark Knight)