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  • The Greatest Movie Ever Made: Elf

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    Elf  (2003)

    Knowing  (2009)

    No sooner did I post my thoughts on the worst movie ever made, than Simon Mayo, Mark Kermode's sidekick, weighed in with Knowing as his "worst" candidate, on their 3/27 podcast. Kermode properly told Mayo the same thing that I wrote in my post: Dude, you've missed a lot of bad movies if Knowing is the worst you've ever seen. But then Kermode, who ought to know better, turned around and suggested What Dreams May Come as a reasonable "worst" candidate of his own. Proving that no one is immune to worstitis, the irresistable urge to go the limit when describing a movie that you (you) didn't like.

    It's never just once with these worst-enders. I know because I've checked. Can it be that each time they name a new "worst," it's truly worse than the last worst one that they named? Do they announce their worst car when they buy it? Their worst house? Their worst wife? Their worst newborn?

    Tell me that the movies aren't just getting worster and worster. Tell me that there is bestitis out there as well.

    I googled "Greatest Movie Ever Made." 79,700 hits, including Citizen Kane, of course, and IMDB's Shawshank, and The Dark Knight from the fanboys. But also Conan the Barbarian, I Am Legend, Last Year at Marienbad, Shogun Assassin, and Elf.

    I'm ignoring Peter Igluishvilli's choice of Lions for Lambs as his "worst," as he is only ten years old, just arrived from the woods east of Kutaisi on the Rioni river, and in his life has seen only one other movie, "The House Bunny" (his "greatest").

    It seems that "best" and "worst" appraisals are skewed toward the young, not the old, where the judgement would be based upon a greater number of movies seen. Suppose, for example, that a 110-year-old individual has been watching 100 movies/year since the age of 10. Now suppose that I ask him or her to name the "best" movie out of those 10,000 movies that he or she has seen, and suppose that he or she responds, "Elf." That would indicate some advanced degree of dementia in the cinematic portion of his or her brainpan.

    "Greatest Movie I've Ever Seen" 2,370. Shattered, Hancock, Revolver, Valkyrie, Titanic.

    "Best Movie I've Seen" 85,500 Hmm. Best in a while. Best this year. Best of its kind. Best is more provisional than worst, it seems.

    "Best Movie Ever Made" 110,000. Well, well. "The Best Movie Ever Made" (1997). Directed by Steve Bencich. Otherwise, Easy Rider, Commando ("This is the best movie ever made, it should have won 1 million Oscars." Nice), Showgirls, Crash.

    There seem to be more worsts than bests. Easier to make a bad movie than a good one? "Greatest" picks are less great than "Worst" picks are worse. That is, "greatest" picks are more often bad than "worst" picks are good. What does this mean? That movies are generally worse than we imagine, but, hey, not that bad? Or is it that the motivations behind choosing best and worst are entirely different? Worst springs from disappointment and hurt and a cynical abandonment of hope, a cry for help, abuse from the abused, denial of death, turning away from the void, a disgust at wasting 10 bucks or so, plus parking, coke, and popcorn. Best is warmed cockles or weepy moments or laughter (forgetting) or relief that it wasn't you, or whatever it is that makes art art.

    Since there's a thin line between love and hate, it's no suprise that there are movies listed as both the best and worst ever made. Showgirls, Crash, Hancock, and Citizen Kane all qualify. The U.S. elected George Bush, twice, and then Barak Obama, so why can't Hancock and Kane be brothers?

    I called a guy who listed Zombie Breakfast as his worst. I thought Breakfast wasn't bad. Bad? he said. It was terrible! Undoubtedly the worst movie ever made! I asked him if he'd seen the sequel, Zombie Brunch, a real stinker. Seen it? he said. Yeah, I saw it. It was ten times as bad as Zombie Breakfast. The worst!


  • Homo Erectus - a review

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    Homo Erectus  (2007)

    aka National Lampoon's Stoned Age. NL has produced a closetful of clunkers over the years, but Adam Rifkin gets this genre film right, the genre being Movies To Watch While You're Drunk. I was and it was.

     It's all here:

    David Carradine as MooKoo, proving once again that he will do literally anything for a paycheck. He's especially good in the scenes where he's carrying his head under his arm.

    Talia Shire as his wife, mother of the clan, who will do anything for a fur, even if it's off an australeamoustisimus.

    Ron Jeremy as Oog, who doesn't show it, but at this point doesn't really have to anymore. Anybody who cares has memorized it by now.

    Gary Busey as Krutz, who doesn't have to act crazy to be crazy.

    Ali Larter as Fardart, showing off the best set of prehistoric choppers in film history, although Raquel Welch still beats her from the neck down.

    Carol Alt as Queen Fallopia. "You turn me down?? Every Neanderthal between here and the volcano wants to get into this lizard-skin thong!"

    Kansas Carradine as the pregnant cavewoman. David's daughter adds her oiled belly to several of the scenes wherein the women drop their pelts.

    and Adam Rifkin, who gets hit in the head by large rocks twenty, no, twenty-two, no... I was too far gone to keep track.

    The movie poses the question, If you paste large shaggy patches of fake pubic fur over the female actors' actual areas, is that still full-frontal, or what?


  • The Curious Case of Brad Pitt

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    The name Benjamin Button is odd, but the name that always bothered me a little was Brad Pitt. I would ask myself, why choose a name like Pitt for your screen name? This was before I realized that these days, lots of actors keep their own names, regardless, and that Thomas Bradley Pitt was one of them.

    It never bothered me that the two Pitts were Prime Minister. Eartha Kitt was OK. Mitt was OK, though I didn't like his politics. I've got nothing against armpits, or fruit pits, or Pittsburgh.

    Just seemed like a strange name to choose. Now if he ever marries Angelina (whose real name is Angelina Jolie Voight), she can be Angelina Pitt.


  • The Pixar Story: A Review

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    The Pixar Story  (2007)

    The Pixar Story is an inhouse documentary presenting, in 88 minutes, the Pixar story. It's slick, it's historical, and if you're interested, it's worth a watch. Not so easy to find, though, unless you're willing to download it from not-your-public-library, where it is available in abundance.

    I could see Pixar from my office window. A Sarah Palin thing. I don't mean that I could see it now if I wanted to but don't want to, I mean that I used to could see it, but that was a couple of offices ago, back in the 80s. Sitting at my desk I could make it out. At the time, my office window looked out over a parking lot where a hawk swooped down and grabbed a pigeon, and even if you think that pigeons are flying rats, I'm sorry, but I've had rats for pets. Except for that naked tail, they're pretty cool. This was back when I worked above the Sand Dabs Restaurant and the aroma of deep-fried dabs would rise up right around naptime - back when I could see Pixar, I mean, not back when I had the rats; in fact, back when I could see Pixar, I had a parakeet, and in addition to Pixar, I could see the office of the parakeet's doctor, off to the left. Pixar was across the street behind the multistoried, zigguratlike Ask building, next to the Target loading dock. I could have worked at Pixar; I mean, I could have walked in and applied for a job, instead of jogging past the building every day. I guess that I could say the same about Yahoo when it was still stuck in a little building on the Central Expressway, next to the Decathalon Club - where, having laid off 15,000 last week, it may end up again - or when I worked three buildings down from Google on Garcia, when Google was just being born and was peddling their search engine incestuously to Yahoo. That's why I think of Pixar as sort of related to Target, because they were side by side, and because of the Target-like product packed into Toy Story as a consequence of the animators going over to Target for their pre-Starbucks coffee during their early brainstorming. But the point is, Pixar from the start was connected in its spiritual innards to Hollywood, whereas my company abandoned Jesus in those tough times and signed a deal with the Defense Department, so that while Pixar was working on 3D-landscapes to entertain, and while the DOD was abandoning their attempts to teach homing pigeons in the warheads of Cruise missles to peck at touchscreen pictures of the terrain around Verbiblobstakaya and instead was rolling into Silicon Valley like a Stephen-King black fog to shop for databasemaker systems that could map a route from a silo north of Seattle to the center of Moscow, to be used by a missle travelling the whole shot at a height of 3 feet above the steppe, my company was vectoring down 101 past Moffett Field to the Blue Cube and Lazy L. Leaving me in the end with this question: if one guy wins an Oscar for animation and the other guy contributes to the destruction of the human race via massive nuclear strikes, which one wins? Mothers, don't raise your children to build bombs tra la. Pixar moved across the bay to Richmond Point, anyway; impossible commute. For another time: how game designers and animators fit in, the sales and use of whose work dwarfs the efforts of Pixar and its kin; but does not dwarf, in spite of all those dollars and all that game violence, the real bomb makers.

    Pixar started out as a group of bright young people in Lucasfilm, got bought by Steve Jobs from Lucas, made some hits, went public, made some more hits, sold out to Disney, made Ratatouille and Wall-E while managing, despite being acquired and despite the aging of its bright young people, to avoid absorption by Disney, and subsequent decline. So far. The Pixar Story - the movie - was completed in the Ratatouille timeframe. On a parallel timeline, Pacific Data Images started out with some bright young people, contributed to some movies, sold out to Dreamworks, made some hits, spun off as PDI/Dreamworks, made some more hits. Whereas I could see Pixar from my office window, I can see PDI from the roof of my house, down in a complex that does its little bit to wreck the baylands. A friend who works there tells me that the old timers - PDI was founded in 1979 - say that the atmosphere in the company hasn't changed so much over the years. Dreamworks, at the other end of the state, hasn't done to PDI yet what Disney will probably end up doing to Pixar.

    The Pixar Story comprises animated snippets alternating with talking heads. I've had it up to here with talking heads. Especially serious heads, telling me how hard they worked, lord how hard, and are all now without exception crudzillionaires. But wait a minute. I go out in my shorts every day and while jogging listen to the Washington Post political podcast, Slate, Washington Week, MacLaughlin, To the Point, Day By Day (RIP), News and Notes (RIP), Left Right and Center, The New Yorker Out Loud, Planet Money, so forth. Or did until I downloaded The Fountainhead the other day and got sidetracked by 30 hours of Ayn Rand. Is it that I need the talking heads? I talk back? Hold the IPOD like a phone to my ear and talk into it? One talking head in The Pixar Story that caught my attention was the former CEO of Robertson Stephens Investment Bank, which went down hard when the dot.com bubble burst. Watching him was like watching Hamlet talking to the skull in the graveyard. And George Lucas, get off the screen! You have lost your right to pontificate about anything ever again. Thank God your divorce and Howard the Duck made you dump Pixar before you started writing stories for it.

    Man, did Steve Jobs make a bundle off Pixar. The magic touch. Apple, NeXT, Pixar. My daughter-in-law's sister is his favorite serving person in Woodside. Another Palin thing. He's a good tipper, or maybe that's just money falling accidentally from his pocket when he pulls out his handkerchief. I also won a free lunch at a lunchwagon that parked outside NeXT every workday noon, two blocks dowon from the Glomar Explorer. I got pinworms along with the lunch, which only in recent years can you treat with an over-the-counter remedy; before that, you had to get a prescription and the only place you could get one, if you were the typical carrier of pinworms, was in the emergency room, so that when I fell off a ladder and separated both shoulders and was transported in exquisite pain to the hospital, transported, I had to wait to be seen in line behind three individuals with pinworms, such being the vagaries of triage. For this I do not blame Steve Jobs. In the movie, which took seven years to make, Jobs retains the fat of midlife and good living, which has since melted away with his cancer. :(

    What's the difference between "It's hard to remember" and "It's easy to forget"? Young kids just out of school, wearing those cotton pants that I always thought would be a reasonable alternative to jeans but could never find, and short-sleeved patterned shirts still favored by the Indian employees hereabouts. Animation scientists. Lasseter gets canned from Disney in the first 15 minutes of The Pixar Story. I googled "roy disney weird looking." 154 hits but not the kind that I was expecting.

    Sign of the times: notice how nobody asks for "a reasonable facsimile thereof" anymore? The copy now equals the original. Back in the day, you had to sit down and draw a bunch of boxtops that looked like the single one that you had, in order to buy the poster without having to ten boxes of Wheaties. How long before live actors will no longer be needed, or wanted, in films, squeezed out by their virtual brothers and sisters? How long before actors join gas-station attendants in their netherworld? Or will actors hang on like supermarket checkout clerks, battling automation? Note that PIXAR spelled backwards is RAXIP (Replace Actors with Xygotefree Illusionary Personas). Didn't Steve Jobs as a young man look like the devil? Now what? Live actors to take refuge in/on the internet? How will that work? Porn is practically there already, but I mean otherwise?

    When computer animation cranked up, old-fashioned pen-and-ink cartoonists were in fear for their jobs; The Pixar Story shows them still busy with those pencils, but my friend at PDI never sees anyone with pencil in hand, away from the keyboard. In the future, I'm sitting on my couch in front of my Sony holographic box and my neighbor, who already, here in the present, bemoans the paucity of gigs in the acting profession, says to me, "Hey, I could do that!" as we watch a movie in which Buzz Lightyear appears to actually be the authentic Clark Gable. No, my neighbor couldn't do that, because Gable pulls off his leg and beats a chicken with it. Pathetic.

    Sure, live actors will keep acting. I just wrote a review about two guys who spent 29K doing a 9-day shoot for their movie. But you know what? They spent another 500+ days at the computer using Adobe Creative Suite 3. But yes, live actors will persist. There are still clipper-ship captains, aren't there? About four of them, versus thousands in the 1800s. There are still muleskinners. Or are there? There aren't that many damn mules anymore. Mine is gone, laid low by loneliness. There isn't a single mule in the family anymore. You ever eat mule? There's good eatin on a mule. And you know how they say that if gays can marry, next thing some guy will marry his goat? What about cartoons? One fellow applied to marry Jessica Rabbit. He was turned down not because she was a cartoon, but because she was a rabbit. If I marry the cartoon Maggie Gyllenhaal, does that mean that nobody else can too? Does it mean that I can get that scene in Sherry, Baby removed so that nobody can watch it but me? From here on out, PDI is going strictly 3D-with-the-glasses for theatrical releases - the next step toward these unholy unions? And what about those scriptures that say the sheeps will be separated from the goats? Why the goat-hate?

    With regard to blockbusters: when an animated blockbuster becomes absolutely indistinguishable from a real one, will anyone ever hire 10,000 extras again, or travel to strange and photogenic sites, a la The Fall? Will DIY filmamakers at their computers bifurcate into the ones who make extravagant swashbucklers and the ones in the mumblecore community who mumble to themselves alone in the dark of night bathed in the glow of their flatpanels? There are a few folks out there who prefer vinyl records to digital CDs because the imperfections and underproduced music on the wax disks imbue the music, or so they say, with a richness missing in the sterile digital world. Will it be like that with the movies? Or will the enterprising animator let a boom mike hang down into the frame and add projector film scratches to create such effects for the old-fashioned movie afficinado?

    Tom Hanks and Tim Allen have a word to say in The Pixar Story. Is it weird that the actors' bodies go first, so that only their voices remain in the movie? "Oh, Tom Hanks is in Toy Story. Isn't that wonderful." When animation makes the computerized actor identical to the real one, but voice technology continues to lag behind the visual, Tom Hanks will be dubbing himself. He'll get paid for the use of his image, of course, but he won't be acting anymore. Or worse, he'll take the money for his image but refuse to do his voice, and then he'll find himself watching himself onscreen sounding like Michael Madsen, who will do literally anything for a buck. And then virtual actors onscreen who become favorites won't be copies of current living favorites anymore - well, they might be, replicas of John Wayne, Jean Harlow, favorites old and new - but more often they'll be new nonexistent actors. And then Tom Hanks' voice will be animated too and used for an imaginary character instead of himself, maybe another Woody (who actually looks and acts more like Dick Van Dyke), and Hanks will be paid for that too and can go spend his money at the Old Actors' Home. But I'm no Luddite. Who will now take the plunge and animate Hilary Swank? Meanwhile, the virtual stars will marry - strange ceremonies on tropical islands where only the animators are present. The virtual stars will have children, who will also become stars. Since they'll be rich, the virtual stars will adopt real babies from Africa. They'll cheat on each other. Thank God there will be virtual Jimmy Stewarts around to maintain some reasonable standards. But then, some sorehead will bring back Anita Bryant.

    In The Pixar Story, the heads talk and then we see the cartoons they created. Irony?


  • Caro Diario (Dear Diary) - Review

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    Caro Diario  (1994)

    dear diary, i just watched a movie that has your italian cousin caro diario in it. now don't be jealous that caro diario appears in a big old color movie, whereas you're just a little bitty blog diary. don't be jealous that nanni moretti puts his little diary up on the big screen and and then writes into it there, or that nanni's so popular and witty and a real know-it-all, whereas you are typed into every day by a nobody who got caught one time with panties on his head. and finally, don't be jealous that whereas i lie to you all the time so that the wife and kids won't find out, nanni includes himself and his wife silvia right up there on the screen along with his little diary, and if he works up a heavy sweat, if you know what i mean, in a movie like quiet chaos, he can always tell silvia that he was just acting. although i hope that his twelve-year-old son doesn't see him doing what he did in that one, at least not until the boy grows up a little bit more. and when, i mean if, i ever do some heavy sweating like that, i'm keeping it to myself, dear diary! you won't need to know and neither will the wife.

    besides, d.d., nanni is sort of like me - popular where he lives but who else knows him? whereas i'm popular in my backyard, but only when i'm throwing buddy his rag bone or pouring purina into his dinner bowl. so hold your head up high, dear little diary, because you know why? eyes are reading you right now! whereas in the big city down there on the flats, with its i-don't-know-how-many libraries, caro diario is to be found only in the old carnegie free branch over by the cooling towers, on a vhs tape in a cardboard box! so sad.

    nanni made caro in three parts:

    part one - while he putt-putts around rome on his vespa, i am cruising pea gap on helga's old huffy. nanni shouts beautiful slogans and that makes him grow beautiful (he says), whereas i squawk at the pickininnies and they pull on my sheet. just kidding. i pass harry and leonard sitting on harry's porch. one day harry and leonard will be inside with the door closed and after that they'll either be back on the porch or off to discover the world, who knows which? dillian is planting lillies in front of the church. leonarda is in the cemetery lying down on a yellow tablecloth, practicing for when she goes there and doesn't come back. when i was in high school, there were scooters all over the place, mostly cushmans. where are they now? nanni says that there is a bridge in rome that he needs to cross twice a day (well, he can't cross it just once, i guess, and still get back home); so i'm crossing pea creek on the huffy, dear diary, on those two-by-fours that the noxapater clan laid down after the last storm washed away their sorry little excuse for a bridge.

    in part two, nanni travels around the aeolian islands with a friend who hasn't watched tv in 30 years. my nanny never watched tv. she could stand on the tail of her bear rug and expectorate a stream of tobacco juice into a hills bros coffee can balanced on the nose of the bear, making the can ring like a bell. she would dunk the head of the bear in a pail of water once a year on easter to clean off the residue of her misses.

    in part three, nanni gets sick. tumor. it don't look good for nanni. mild spoiler: 15 years later, at 55, he's still kicking. at first he just itched, dear diary, whereas i've got this godawful boil that makes me wonder how the hell i rode around the hamlet on that huffy all afternoon. nanni goes to doctors, whereas i use my special "medicine" from the pine grove half a mile up the hill. then nanny applies a poultice to the area and gives me a high colonic, though she don't call it that. so don't get sick, and if you want a horror film, forget saw or hostel and go find a documentary about cancer. also, quit watching so many movies and go help somebody who needs your help.

    what a thinker nanni is, d.d.! you won't catch him doing analogy or metaphor in this movie, no more than i do in you. he spits out the facts, straight onto the subtitles. although come to think of it, when he was riding around rome, there was no traffic, whereas on one of the islands that he visits, traffic is gridlocked and honking about it. could that mean something? can irony be metaphor?

    anyway, thank you to duder for recommending the movie. it was good and it got me going. tomorrow, dear diary, i'm watching guadacanal diary and then taking my .22 out into the field to plink varmints. then i'm going to italy for three weeks to visit cinquefrondi, mammola, and grotteria on a rented vespa. ciào for now.


  • KISS CHEMISTRY: CAN A LIGHTBULB SMOOCH A LIGHTENING BOLT?

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    The Notebook  (2004)

    I was watching the poorly-received Over Her Dead Body (2008) the other night, (Rotten Tomatoes = 14%) and enjoying it, when, along toward the middle of the movie, Paul Rudd and Lake Bell realize that they're in love, and smooch. Then, pulling back, Rudd makes a little joke about it. Ok, I understand that there is such a thing as a "script," and that in this romantic comedy, the protagonists are keeping it light, but still... After Bell lays one on him, in a perfect world, wouldn't Rudd have a few more stars in his eyes? So it occured to me that his star power, so cool here, maybe was overmatching Lake's, whereas if he tried that with Angelina Jolie, say, he'd have looked like a schmoe. Could it be that when we talk about the chemistry between a man and a woman in a romantic movie, we're just comparing their relative star powers? If the luminesences match, the kiss works; otherwise, it doesn't? So that Tom Hanks can't give or receive a good smooch in his movies because he's too big, starwise, for his leading ladies? The Fiennes brothers are good smoochers because they consistently hook up with medium-level female stars? Or how about Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams in The Notebook (2004) - there's a star-power match.

    Requires further research.


 


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