A Scanner Darkly

Movie: A Scanner Darkly (2006)
Watched with: Jessy

I actually went all the way to Santa Barbara to see this, because I very much liked the book and it's had a whole month to work its way here to San Luis and hasn't.

I was thoroughly satisfied with it, but between reading A Scanner Darkly and watching Waking Life, both about a month ago, there wasn't terribly much surprise left. The movie's probably the most faithful novel adaptation I've seen (unless you count Sin City), and that's really cool, but it also meant there were few surprises for me.

It's very cool. I might even buy it when it comes out. But finally seeing it almost felt like an afterthought.

Æon Flux

Movie: Æon Flux (2005)
Watched with: Angelo

Angelo wanted to get this, so we waited til Hollywood Video would let us rent it for free.

I was worried I'd hate it, and I didn't, but after the first like 20 minutes, which were slightly cool, there was just no reason to keep paying attention.

It wasn't, like, painful, but since there was more or less no narrative, it was just like looking at a kind of cool drawing--it's cool, but once you get the gist there's just no reason to keep paying attention.

After about 40 minutes, we turned it off and watched a pretty good old Star Trek episode I hadn't seen.

Galaxy Quest

Movie: Galaxy Quest (1999)
Watched: Just me and the scifi, babe

I think it was Mark & Brian who called this movie "better than it really has a right to be" and that about covers it. It's much better than it's premise suggests, and its combination of scifi satire and actual dopey scifi stuff is occasionally jarring, but pretty consistently entertaining.

I really like Monk, so this viewing I was particularly entertained by Tony Shalhoub's performance as "Tech Sergeant Chen".

Annie Hall

Movie: Annie Hall (1977)
Watched with: All by my lonesome

This is one of those movies I'd always vaguely intended to see, but never got around to.

It's kind of aimless and occasionally masturbatory (it's filmmaking about a person I love!), but a lot of it is charming and pretty funny.

The way the characters looked back on their memories by walking through them reminded me a lot of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so I guess ole Gondry was cribbin' a bit, though very niftily.

Foxy Brown

Movie: Foxy Brown (1974)
Watched with: John and Angelo

I'd watched like half of this in my Film 174 class last quarter, and while it was fun to watch the whole thing, it turned out that he basically showed us the good half hour.

Coffy (of which Foxy is nominally a sequel) delivered on the badass fights and sexy babes, but also had some genuinely thought-provoking social commentary. It wasn't super deep or nothin', but there was something to it. Not so much this time.

That said, any movie where Pam Grier sets drug dealers on fire can't be all bad.
Definitely a good time, but not as good as its predecessor.

Novocaine

Movie: Novocaine (2001)
Watched with: John and Angelo

Angelo grabbed a random movie as a joke and then John and I actually wanted to rent it, so that backfired on him.

This is kind of a psuedo-film noir with Steve Martin as a dentist seduced by Helena Bonham Carter and wrongfully accused of the murder of her brother.

Not a classic, but pretty decent and pretty funny. Worth renting.

Clerks II

Movie: Clerks II (2006)
Watched with: My mom

For a long time, I was convinced this was going to suck, but it's pretty much funny from the opening shot. After a little bit of set-up (the Quick Stop has burned up and Dante and Randall resort to jobs at the Mooby's restaurant from Dogma and Jay & Silent Bob), the film quickly falls into the kind of customer-antagonization and nerd debates in a pitch-perfect redux of the original Clerks.
Things are mixed up somewhat by the additions of 19-year-old Jesus nerd Elias and babely manager...um...Rosario Dawson, as well as a somewhat focused plot abou the love triangle between Rosario, Dante and his fiancee...um...Kevin Smith's wife. But these changes mostly just keep things fresh, and it remarkably manages to capture the Clerks feel impeccably.

Visually, the movie looks a fair amount like Chasing Amy, which I think is easily the most visually attractive of Smith's films. It never looks glitzy and "Hollywood" (a significant problem with Jersey Girl), but it does look professional and attractive.

Basically everything Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back did wrong, Clerks II does right--there's enough references to the other movies (most notably Clerks, naturally) to maintain continuity and throw in some extra laughs for fans, but it never descends into an awful string of injokes. I didn't really like Ben Affleck's cameo (is he supposed to be Holden from Chasing Amy or is the 'View Askewniverse' burdened with yet another Affleck?) or that you can see Spanish tile roofs in one scene (revealing that much of the movie was shot in fucking Buena Park, not Jersey), and the list of people who friended Kevin Smith on myspace at the end is pretty pathetic, but all those are trivial complaints about what is all around a good time.

Kevin Smith's filmmaking ranges from dick and weed jokes to smart satire to unapologetic sentimentality, and he's had some successes and failures at each. Clerks II handles them all deftly, and while it's not as memorable as, say, Dogma, I think it's actually more solid.
There's a significant way in which this is be his best movie.

Star Wars: Clone Wars Volume 2

Movie: Star Wars: Clone Wars Volume 2
Watched with: Angelo

We rented Volume 1 like a year ago, and it was basically a bunch of short vignettes of Jedi beating up battle droids. It was set between Episodes II and III and did a good job of imitating the Star Wars universe, but it was basically just a series of fun kinetic animations.

Volume 2 is more like an actual movie. It still has plenty of crazy fight sequences (which are far more charming and inventive than those in the actual Star Wars prequels), but it has a fairly complex and interesting story.
Unlike its episode predessor, it has two parallel plots that run throughout--one is the staged kidnapping of the Chancellor on Coruscant while Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson in the movies) and friends try to stop it by punching robots. Meanwhile, Anakin and Obi-Wan make friends with a strange tribe on a primitive planet.

The first storyline delivers the requesite action and does a fine job of it, but it was the second one that really stuck with me. There's this incredible sequence where we see the tribe's cave paintings come to life, depicting a figure who is clearly meant to be Annakin facing increasingly powerful foes and getting stronger as he bests each, but ultimately turning on the people he intended to save. The lines of the image shatter and reform briefly into the Vader mask before falling apart.
It's really artistically original while still thoroughly Star Wars.

It is perhaps worth noting that the sequences on the primitive planet again put George Lucas's "if make them aliens it's not racist" theory to the test, though the Lemur-people's witch doctor masks are less offensive than Jar Jar on every level, and you can only get so offended by characters who do something as awesome as ride giant Yak-elephants.

All around, this little movie is leagues better than both Episode I and II. It's only worse than III because some of the actors aren't as good (they clearly cast people based on how much they sounded like the film leads, and did a fantastic job of that, but sounding like Ewan MacGregor and acting like him are two different things--Obi-Wan basically just comes off as a dick), though no one's worse than Hayden Christensen.

Basically, George Lucas can't make a Star Wars movie as good as the guy who made fucking Dexter's Lab, and that's kind of sad. But I guess I should just be glad that this exists at all.

(You can watch about half of it on Youtube, or buy the whole thing for 10 bucks from iTunes if that's your scene)

Total Recall

Movie: Total Recall (1990)
Watched with: Angelo and John

Man, Paul Verhoeven continues to basically be my hero.
If I were going to adapt a Phillip K. Dick story to a movie, I'd try to stay faithful to it in tone at least if not in content, but no one can fill it with absurd violence and rampant explosions better than ole Paul.

Total Recall is thematically similar to Verhoeven's later Starship Troopers (the real one, not Roughnecks) in that it's an incredibly dumb action movie that's also a critique of incredibly dumb action movies, but it's more explicitly meta-referential than the later film, with characters arguing with each other about the movie's u nreality based on the absurdity of events.

It's probably for the better that most movies aren't like this, but I'm glad they're a couple.

Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles

Movie: Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles (1999)
Watched with: John and Angelo

Angelo and John made me rent this.
I really do like Starship Troopers--it's simultaneously a big dumb scifi movie and a satire of big dumb scifi movies--and it's a lot of fun.
Starship Troopers 2 is a low budget The Thing-ripoff which should not be watched under any circumstances.

Roughnecks is nowhere near as bad as that, but there's nothing to recommend it.

Oh, who am I kidding?

No one other than us would even consider renting Roughnecks.

It's basically a remake of the movie only with bad CGI taking the place of Michael Ironside and Doogie Howswer and the rest. Ugly CGI characters mimick scenes from the movie to a synth-rap soundtrack.

I made them turn it off after 20 minutes and we watched Total Recall.

Solaris

Movie: Solaris
Watched with: Angelo

This is a strange, eerie movie about an intelligent planet that creates copies of the loved ones of the people on a nearby space station. It's a remake of a Soviet movie from the 70s.

It was pretty good--intelligent and emotional, with good performances and good effects (not that the latter mattered much to the story), but I couldn't help but feel like it should be better.

Smart scifi movies are pretty rare--the best you can usually hope for is an occasionally thoughtful punchfest like Minority Report--so when one comes along, I guess I expect a lot from it.

I wouldn't call Gattaca brilliant, but this isn't as good as Gattaca.

Maybe I'll rent the old commie one. Or read the book.

Catwoman

Movie: Catwoman
Watched with: Angelo

We were going to go to the pizza place and play arcade games, but it turned out they closed at midnight not 1 so we were screwed. For reasons to complicated to go into, a pirated copy of Catwoman has been sitting in our living room for a year, so we decided to have at it.

The movie's every bit as bad as has been said, and it's reputation is well-earned. The effects are shitty, she doesn't move like a cat, and the story makes no sense.

But noting those things ignores the real problems. They're quibbling.

What makes Catwoman truly terrible is its bizarre combination of Joel Schumacher style glitz (everything is lit like a third rate Batman Forever--what sexiness Halle Berry has left in that dopey helmet is killed by blue and yellow lights that make her look jaundiced) and slow sloppiness.

The editing on the movie is bizarre. The plot unfolds quickly, but each event happens as slowly and boringly as possible. Chase scenes are random and spastic, but with slow cuts that make you yearn for a hack MTV editor to come in and at least make things exciting.

I was all ready to blame the editor, but it turns out the person in question also edited The Fifth Element and The Professional (damn Frogs), so it's not like s/he is incompetent.

The director (one-named "Pitoff") is a first-timer, so maybe it's his fault.
I dunno.
If you're a regular human, stay away from this, but if you're interested in filmmaking, it's a pretty fascinating case of what not to do.

It's awful, but it's uniquely awful. Bleh and wow.

Dinotopia

Movie: Dinotopia (2002)
Watched with: Angelo and John

I didn't expect this to be very good, and it wasn't (it's four hours long, and we stopped it after 2 and a half and forgot to finish it). But I liked the book and I was curious, and it actually turned out to be pretty entertaining.

The acting and dialogue were atrocious (say the following in a mumbly deadpan: "Eat or be eaten. Kill or be killed. It's the law of the jungle") but in a pretty amusing way, and the art direction (strongly influenced by the book's striking visuals) was good.

And dinosaurs are always fun.

Not great, but I have no regrets.

Day of Wrath

Movie: Day of Wrath (2006)
Watched with: Jessy, Angelo, and John

Having us four all together seemed like a special enough occasion to justify the latest Christopher Lambert opus--



--which was actually less dumb than it looks. It was a conspiratorial murder mystery set during the Spanish Inquisition, but we all kind of lost track of the labyrinthine plot and mostly just laughed at Christopher Lambert getting beat up while Jessy and John ate like 40 Otter Pops each.

The movie had very good costumes and sets, and Christopher Lambert was the same ole lovable growly guy we met in Highlander and fell in love with in many shitty scifi movies.

This was actually one of the best movies I've seen ole Christophe in, and having the greatest actor ever in an actually decent movie for once was pretty keen.

If you like Christopher Lambert, you should check this one out. If you don't like Christopher Lambert, you're a horrible person.

Fantastic Planet

Movie: Fantastic Planet (1973)
Watched with: Angelo

This was a really neat movie which completely exceded my expectations.

As a French cartoon, I figured it was going to be kind of artsy and pretentious and not go anywhere. That's kind of true, but it also has a decent story that holds together really well.

It's about an alien race of giants. They've imported humans to the planet and basically treat them like rats--some are pets, some are experimented on (it's implied, at least), and most are just considered vermin.

The main character is a human who is raised by an alien teenager (one of their weeks is a decade for a human, he explains) who also semi-accidently helps him learn all the stuff she does through her schooling. He escapes, and becomes the leader of a tribe of free humans.

The concept is pretty Planet of the Apes but the execution is slow-paced and pretty and strange. The art prevents the story from becoming trite and the story prevents the art from becoming senseless (mostly).

The course of events is hardly shocking, and the ending is pretty halfassed, but it never fails to be entertaining.

You can actually watch the entire thing on Google Video but it has an obnoxious new soundtrack, which kind of ruins it, not unlike the crappy tinted disco version of Metropolis.
Even if you like that kind of music (which I don't), removing the dialogue makes the movie more alienating, which does not work to its benefit.
Maybe watch the video a little bit to get a sense of what the movie is like, and then do yourself a favor and rent it.

The Valley of Gwangi

Movie: The Valley of Gwangi (1969)
Watched with: Angelo and John

I read several reviews of Nacho Libre where they said it wasn't bad, but that considering the material they had to work with (Jack Black and Mexican wrestling), it seems like it was worse than it should be.

That's kind of how I feel about The Valley of Gwangi. It's about COWBOYS AND DINOSAURS!
Watch this clip and tell me it doesn't look great.

Unfortunately, the movie does relatively little with its great premise. It has some neat dinosaur shots, and the cowboy stuff is kind of funny, but the story is plodding and obvious, basically a rehash of King Kong without the emotional core of that story.
They bring the dinosaur back to the town, everyone runs away, it gets set on fire and dies. No drama.

Even the effects are pretty unexciting. They're not any better than in Mighty Joe Young two decades earlier*, and the dinosaurs are garish colors that make them look like models.

The Valley of Gwangi is still probably worth seeing just because it's so bizarre, but in a way I kind of wish I hadn't rented it, because the version I had imagined in my head was so much cooler.

--
*Some shots in Mighty Joe of cowboys roping beasts were actually intended for a 40s version of Gwangi that never got finished!

Minority Report

Movie: Minority Report (2002)
Watched with: Angelo

I saw this in theaters but I didn't remember it very well.

Two things struck me about it--

1) With its hero falsely accused of a crime and being pursued by the government he once supported via sophisticated technolgy and explosive action sequences, this is basically the science fiction Enemy of the State.

2) Despite this, while I haven't read "Minority Report", the main character is actually strangely similar to the protagonist of the novel A Scanner Darkly (and probably the movie too, though I've yet to see the movie, because it's not playing here).
Both characters used to have a normal family life, but are now single drug addict cops.
Odd.


I guess Minority Report's a pretty good movie. I think my biggest real criticism of it is that Steven Speilburg is really shitty at being creepy, so characters like the mean eye doctor are less intimidating than they should be.

Also, Washington DC is basically all black people except the President, and it's dopey that the movie doesn't reflect that.

Kibakichi 2

Movie: Kibakichi 2 (2004)
Watched with: John and Angelo

This is a sequel to the Hollywood Video-based Japanese import breakout hit Kibakichi, about a werewolf samurai. The first one had some badass visuals but was kind of boring. This one had less striking imagery but better action sequences and was pretty funny.

Not a lot of specifics to say. It was what you'd expect from a movie about a werewolf samurai, but that's something pretty cool.

Also, the music was pretty good.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep

Movie: Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2006)
Watched with: John and Angelo.

I haven't written about last night's movies yet, but I'm pissed off enough about this one now that I need to get it out of my system.

John made Angelo rent this while I was at work, and when I got off they brought it over. John thought it would be a good movie because they slapped HP Lovecraft's name on the front and he thought the cover looked cool.

The cover looked like this:


I pointed out that, aside from having a straight jacket and gas mask, the look of this cover was very unimpressive. To illustrate this, I made my own, out of a picture of me and of a cat we used to have.

My cover looked like this:


And this movie is so much worse than even its mediocre cover suggests.

In a normal movie, if your cinematography, lighting, acting, editing, script, sound mix and everything are abysmal, you try to fix them. But in a low budget horror movie, you can claim that's part of the TERRIFYING HORROR.
This was badly shot in kind of a faux-Blair Witch style, with ugly high contrast lighting, sub-high school drama acting, jumpy headache-enducing editing, awful dialogue (not even good in that verbose Lovecraft way) and...I don't particularly remember the sound, but I'm sure it was bad.
If your movie's mise-en-scene is "shittiness", you're not scary.
You're just shitty.

Every time I go to a screening of student films, I wonder about the people who's movies are incompetent even after years of schooling.
"Do these people really think they can work in the industry?" I wonder.

Apparently, the answer is yes.

They grow up to be Barrett J. Leigh and Thom Maurer.

"Thom"?

Fuck these guys.

Superman II

Movie: Superman II (1980)
Watched with: Angelo

I definitely watched Superman at some point and I seem to have forgotten to write about it on here. Oh well.

Superman II really frustrated me. The awkwardness of the romance between Lois and the unmasked Kal-El is really well played; considering their relative blandness in the first movie, their performances here are particularly impressive.
Some of the special effects are pretty cool too, though not as good as the first film.

However, I'm pretty much certain this movie did not have a script.
Stuff happens without explantion, characters come and go at random...
The evil Kryptonians take over the planet and this doesn't appear to affect people's lives in any significant way.

People who are really into this sort of thing blame the movie's sloppiness on the producers replacing original director Richard Donner with a guy named Richard Lester (I guess they had a thing for Richards).
Basically, people say that Donner did all the good stuff and Lester came in ruined it. There was a big petition to have the "good version" released, and apparently now it's going to be.

But I really find that hard to swallow.

The scenes between Lois and Clark after the discovery are some of the most effective parts of the movie, and Lester apparently directed those. And Lex Luthor getting broken out of jail via hot air ballon is awful, and Donner seems to be responsible.

So I dunno.

People blame Star Wars for ruining the film industry by pressuring all the studios into pumping out high budget blockbusters, but at least Star Wars has a compelling story with real momentum.
This movie has such a cool premise--3 Kryptonian criminals take over the Earth and Superman has to chose between fighting them and loving Lois. But it's ambling and pointless, with slow boring action sequences that its braindead dialogue ("Kneel before Zod! Kneel before Zod! You! Kneel before Zod!") utterly fails to compensate for.

I haven't seen Superman Returns yet, but I can't imagine it's as aimless as this.

North by Northwest

Movie: North by Northwest (1959)
Watched with: Danielle

I'd seen this before, but didn't remember huge chunks of it, so I thought it was worth seeing again.

It's weird, cause the first half is so gripping and strange and, despite the bizarreness of some of it, oddly believable. I admired it for having the time to let the characters slow down and talk even though it's an espionage thriller.

But then the climax is typical action movie crap. I know it's a classic, and I love Hitchcock as much as everyone, but people punching each other on top of Mount Rushmore seems like it'd be more at home in a Jerry Brukheimer production.

Still, it's a very nifty movie and I'm glad I rewatched it.

Hollow Man

Movie: Hollow Man (2000)
Watched with: Angelo

I wanted to see this because, after liking the corporate criticism of Robocop and the fascism psuedo-critique of Starship Troopers, I wanted to see some more Paul Verhoeven, and Angelo refused to watch Basic Instinct.

Unfortunately, Hollow Man lacks the screenwriter behind those better scifi movies, and in their place is the guy who brought us such thoughtful masterpieces as Air Force One and End of Days.

The very first scene of Hollow Man is already dumb, as an impossibly loud and impossibly fast rat (have you ever heard a rat loudly squeak or seen it run?) is eaten by an invisible gorilla. Considering gorillas are herbavores--not even omnivores like chimpanzees and humans--this is about is implausible as the invisibility serum itself.

More generally, the first 45 minutes or so of the movie are pretty good. The invisibiity effect is cool, the characters (while not exactly deep) are distinguishable and passably interesting, and it's all fittingly dramatic.

The movie fails once the screenwriter got bored and had Kevin Bacon just turn evil.
There's an interesting moment where he realizes no one can stop him from spying on his hot neighbor and he says, "I shouldn't...but...who would know?"
It could have been really cool if the movie was about his slow descent into creepiness.
Instead, he just breaks in and rapes her. Ugly and obvious and boring.

The other way it could have been interesting is if he turned evil immediately but then he stayed out of sight, and the other characters could be constantly paranoid about whether or not he's there. It kind of tries to do this, but then they get bored and have him start smashing windows and it's dumb.

The climax is senseless and uninteresting, inexiplicably involving an exploding elevator shaft.

The way in which Paul Verhoeven is awesome is not a way which precludes him doing shit movies, so I can't really say I'm dissapointed, but it should have been better.

Gattaca

Movie: Gattaca (1997)
Watched with: Angelo and John

I don't really have a lot to say about this, since I wrote an essay on it for my Technothrillers class Winter quarter. But it's still a movie I'm glad to own and glad to watch again. One of the better recent scifi movies. I like its style and admire its restraint. I don't really care that much about genetic engineering, but its characters and story arch are compelling enough that it doesn't matter.

Fun fact: NY Times film critic Janet Maslin lamented that Starship Troopers would probably receive more attention than the superior Gattaca (both came out in '97). This year, I bought and wrote essays on both.

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari

Movie: The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920)

Watched with: Angelo and John

The video store was closed for the holiday so we watched one that I owned.
I really like Caligari because, aside from just being cool-looking, I admire it for being a "horror" film more for the way it generates unease than for any shocks (though it does have a couple).

It's a really strange, awesome (in the literal sense) movie that holds up incredibly well.

This is, however, the first time I watched the copy I bought for $5 all the way through.
For the most part, it's acceptable (no tints and medicore music, but the movie's the movie), then every once in awhile they'll do something really horrible, like reveal the dialogue on a note in white writing on a gradient blue background, almost like an FBI warning.
The copy I have was made from the royalty-free version, not the nice restored version, you see.
If you don't mind watching on computer, you can actually just legally download the whole thing yourself.

It's basically the same, so I doubt I'll be rushing out to buy the nice edition soon, but a part of me wishes I would.

Shrek 2

Movie: Shrek 2 (2004)
Watched with: My dad, Elisa, her kids whose names escape me

We put this on for the kids, but it was my idea, so I have no one else to blame. I hadn't actually seen it before.

I don't really like 3D animated cartoons in general (I blame its rise for Disney going from making movies like The Lion King to movies like Chicken Little), and I dislike Dreamworks in particular ("fun for all ages" should mean exciting but with emotional weight, not a kids story with low grade pop culture references for the parents), but Shrek was their least repulsive effort and I was curious.

Sadly, Shrek 2 did about the worst thing it possibly could if it was trying to win me over--making everything about LA.
I guess it's good to love where you live, but it's really annoying how studio filmmakers seem to think LA's the greatest place on Earth. It's especially annoying when they take stories that are supposed to be set in more interesting places and relocate them to right outside their door (for example Keanu Reeve's John Constantine lived in LA instead of the comic's gothic London).
There are interesting things in LA, and even interesting stories to draw out of the locale (shortly before starting this blog, I saw and loved Sunset Blvd), but it's not an epic exciting place, except in a kind of weird artificial way.
It's flat, smog-filled, and ugly, and while you can make a good movie about that kind of place, you can't make a magical one.

The only reason this is sometimes justifiable is for bugetary reasons; it must've been way cheaper to shoot Constantine in LA than in London, so maybe that's why they did it.

Shrek 2 has no excuse. Grimm Fairy Tales are beautiful, evocative, and European. Making them goofy is all well and good (Shrek was a kind of fun movie), but making the fairy kingdom into an injokey Hollywood was just too awful. The filmmakers are so self-obsessed that they can't even tell a fairy story without making it about their boring neighborhood.

I stopped paying attention, and after awhile so did the kids.

The Call of Cthulu

Movie: The Call of Cthulu (2005)
Watched with: Angelo and John

The last time I was in the hip happenin' Insomniac Video, I was looking through the Silent section and I saw this--



--and was kind of confused.
I'm no Lovecraft expert, but I didn't think he'd been around long enough for them to have made a Cthulu movie in the mid-20s (Wikipedia confirms--the story "The Call of Cthulu" was published in 1928, a year after Al Jolson's Jew in black face gave motion pictures sound).
Furthur examination revealed that it was in fact a modern movie shot on digital video but "Mythoscoped" into looking like it came from the 20s.

Having made a little silent movie myself, I was really curious. And since John's been getting into HP Lovecraft, our combined interest was enough to break our Hollywood Video routine.

They did a really good job of imitating that kind of Caligari-style experssionistic lighting, and I admired them for casting people who looked really intense and somewhat old-fashioned. That's particularly impressive considering it was made by the "H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society", and fan films so often are filled with goofy-looking dorkuses (dorkii?).
The sets were generally convincing, and when they weren't they were usually period-fake, so it worked. Same to the modelwork and stop motion, which they blended with the sets really well.

Some of the editing was a little bit awkward, particularly at the climax, which really needed some Birth of a Nation-style cross-cutting to make it more exciting, or for that matter, comprehensible.

All around, it was pretty cool. It was unprofessional enough for me to wonder if I could do better, but good enough for me to doubt that I could (at least, not without a bunch of other really awesome people).
I had fun watching it, and anything that makes you feel creative afterward has to be considered a good thing.

Ark

Movie: Ark (2004)
Watched with: Angelo, John, Nikki

Ugh.
This is the first movie we've rented this summer that I truly regret watching.

This was a big pile of quasi-anime CG scifi crap with pretty much no redeeming elements. At one point I thought, "Well, maybe I would dig this if I were like 10", but I think even as a kid I would have found this vaguely unsatisfying without quite knowing why.
The plot isn't even worth talking about.
It was an artless, dull, too-long-at-80-minutes utter waste of time.

SIDE NOTE: The shittiness is especially surprising when you see all the other great films the distributor has to offer.

Pollock

Movie: Pollock (2000)
Watched with: Nikki

Bio-pics always seem kind of jumpy because they cover a much larger time frame than a regular movie, since they feel curiously obligated to cover the entire interesting part of the subject's life.
Rather than trying to minimize this, Pollock tries to use it as a deliberate artistic effect, and the result is just jumbled and hard to follow.
I guess that's appropriate to a movie about Jackson Pollock in a way, but it's kind of frustrating to watch (though, to be fair, I was pretty tired).

That said, I thought Ed Harris gave a really good performance. A few months ago, I watched American Splendor the day after seeing Harvey Pekar at a signing and it struck me how much weirder Paul Giamatti had made him, like he had to play up Harvey's idiosyncracies to an absurd degree to make him an interesting character. While of course I never met Jack Pollock, I admired the way Harris made him seem somewhat unusual and eccentric without acting like he was just a total freak.