The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires

Movie: The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)
Watched with: Angelo

This was a kung fu movie but with Dracula in it.

It was pretty good except that the ending was pretty anti-climatic, and the presence of Christopher Lee was sorely missed.

But it's still real good and you should see it.

They couldn't make a movie like this now without it being all self-conscious and kitschy.

The Postman

Movie: The Postman (1997--year of Contact and Gattaca and Starship Troopers!)

Watched with: Nobody

Yesterday I was at my friend Erika's house and when I got there she wasn't ready and I ended up watching like 15 minutes of The Royal Tenenbaums with her mom and her sister.

It's a movie I feel pretty ambivalent about, because it's very nicely made and it's funny and well-acted and artistically interesting and everything, but it's also kind of stiff and pretentious.

The Postman is basically the exactly the opposite movie.
It's tacky and obvious and incredibly long and largely artless, but it's also ambling and lovable.

I'm not going to tell you that 3 hours of Kevin Costner wearing a postal outfit and dirty rags in the Pacific Northwest makes for a good movie, because it absolutely doesn't. It lost a bunch of money, and it's hard to imagine how it could have done otherwise.

But it just seems so...genuine. Kevin Costner and friends decided to make the best darn 3-hour post-apocalyptic heartwarming movie they could and while the result is barely watchable, you can't help but love it a little bit.

In an essay I had inexplicably already read and just found again, the author of the book upon which it was based described the movie like so--
My best analogy is this: watching Kevin Costner's three hour epic is a bit like having a great big Golden Retriever jump on your lap and lick your face, while waving a flag tied to its tail. It's big, floppy, uncoordinated, overeager, sometimes gorgeous -- occasionally a bit goofy -- and so big-hearted that something inside of you has to give... that is, if you like that sort of thing.

I'd say it's more like having that golden retriever sit on your lap for a three hour car ride with the windows up, but that's alright.

They could have easily cut out half of this movie without it affecting anything majorly, but I guess that'd be like cutting a golden retriever in half, and we don't do that shit here in America.

This isn't really a movie I'd recommend to anyone (or buy and loan out, as my boss did to me!) but I kind of enjoyed it. And unlike a big smelly dog, the end is probably the coolest part.

Nightwatch

Movie: Nightwatch (2004)
Watched with: Angelo and Kyle

This movie's pretty much an exact cross between Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Underworld, in that it's filmed in a kind of a quirky fantastical way with striking color schemes, but then it's a dismal and boring story where a bunch of vampires do stupid shit there's no reason to care about.

I lost interest about 25 minutes in, but at the end I was still thinking about the first scene and what a cool movie it could've been the start of.

Sorry, Russia. Battleship Potemkin, this ain't.

Snakes on a Plane

Movie: Snakes on a Plane (2006)
Watched with: My dad

I was worried this would be, like, Internet: The Motion Picture, but the changes made in response to the fan clamor appear to consist principally of the addition of boobs and Samuel L. Jackson swearing, which are both very good things.*

My one real complaint is that it gets too...I don't want to call "Snakes on a Plane" disturbing, but when everyone's running around screaming and kittens are getting killed it's just...unpleasant. The movie doesn't stop being funny for long, but I wish it'd kept a lighter tone, maybe more like Slither. It's too dopey to be scary, so it may as well stay fun.

But it does, overall, and even the random B plot about Andiotes on a Helicopter holds its own reasonably well.

It doesn't dissapoint, though I wonder how long its fandom can subsist now that it has a reality to contend with instead of just a hilarious abstract.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

Movie: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
Watched with: John and Angelo

This is probably one of the better post apocalyptic movies I've seen, though I wasn't exactly blown away by it. The weird oasis town is pretty cool, and I like the way the barbaric kids have developed a mythology about the past world. And big mean post-Apocalyptic guys are always good fun.

But once everyone's driving around in cars and shit, it just kind of reminded me of why I found it difficult to care during Road Warrior.

There were a few really awesome moments, but still not enough to turn me into a Mad Max fan.

The Wicker Man

Movie: The Wicker Man (1973)
Watched with: Nobody

What an amazing little movie.

It's about a creepy island off the coast of Scotland where everybody celebrates a weird Pagan religion that's allegedly based on "the old gods" but also has a strong dose of hippie dancing and 1960s folk music.

It features Christopher Lee promintently, but it's not like a typical old Hammer horror movie.
For most of the time, it doesn't seem like a horror movie at all, more of a weird mystery. Most of it's in the daytime, and nothing really horrible happens until the memorable climax.

They're doing a remake with Nicolas Cage that's supposed to come out soonish, but I can't imagine they could possibly make it this ambiguous and incredible.

One Hour Photo

Movie: One Hour Photo (2002)
Watched with: nobody

This movie's kind of frustrating, because Robin Williams gives a really impressive performance, and it's really well shot (the scenes in the store have deep focus to make it look huge and neat while the parts of Sy's life out of the store are in shallow focus and cramped). You care about the characters and it's interesting the whole way through.

But the ending is a huge miscalculation.
What makes the character of Sy so compelling is that there's often a fine line between nice and creepy. Everyone crosses over that line somtimes, and Sy's tragedy is that he takes it too far.

At least, it should be.

At the end, we found out rather arbitrarily that all of Sy's problems are in fact caused by a childhood trauma that made him crazy.
This isn't implausible, neccessarily, but it does make it worse.
We should wonder if we could be Sy without realizing it, not just think, "There but the grace of God go I."

Being John Malkovich

Movie: Being John Malkovich (1999)
Watched with: Angelo and John

This might be one of my favorite movies. I kind of don't like the idea that the only thing keeping people from being evil to each other is being afraid of the consequences, but maybe that's true for some people.

Anyway, aside from that, it's really funny and weird and kind of pretty in its way.

Scifi writer Orson Scott Card (of Ender's Game fame) said about a year ago, "For the past few years I've been telling people that there are only a handful of truly brilliant sci-fi movies, and most of them are by Charlie Kaufman."

I like that this story could have easily been a Twilight Zone episode but they made it artful and weird instead of loud and stupid like too many scifi movies.

I'm sure a lot of people would deny that this is a scifi movie cause they're snoots. I guess other people might deny it because there's no science in it (unlike Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) but it definitely falls into the general category of speculative fiction and beyond that I, for one, don't care.

Corpse Bride

Movie: Corpse Bride (2005)
Watched with: Jessy and Lara

This movie isn't as good as Nightmare Before Christmas, but it's still pretty good. The story's interesting, it's got some good performances and it's sooooo pretty. I really like stop motion, and the fact that it's CG-enhanced means that they can do some really amazing stuff without having it look all awful and plasticky like an all CG movie.

It's not the best, but it's pretty cool.

Baadasssss!

Movie: Baadasssss! (2003)
Watched with: Angelo and my dad

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) is kind of a terrible movie, but it's also kind of brilliant and sublime, motivated by vaguely-defined politics and strange dream logic (thin plot, lots of running around, puctuated by random sex). Melvin Van Peebles knew how to make a conventional movie (and had shortly before, with Watermelon Man, but instead decided to stick it to the man by going awesomely nuts.

Baadasssss! is written by, directed by, and stars Highlander 3 and Jaws 4's Mario Van Peebles as his father (he also portrayed his father's character as a teenager in the opening of the original Sweetback) and tells the story of the shoestring production of that movie. He does a good job of depicting events and people with an immediacy reflecting his personal experience without letting that overshadow the story.
The character Mario speaks little, and is mainly defined by his father.

This couldn't have been an easy movie to make. You have to simultaneously capture the racial atmosphere of 1970s LA, the process of shooting an independent film, the decline of the studio system, and the personalities of the very large cast of characters.
Remarkably, Mario pulls it off, in a movie that turns out to be both illuminating and amusing.

(My biggest problem with the movie was the occasional Star Wars prequel-style bits where something happened that would inspire the making of the movie. I really doubt that one day some babe randomly told Melvin, "You have a sweet sweetback!" and then he made it the opening line of his movie and also the title.
Though I guess it's possible...)

Dazed and Confused

Movie: Dazed and Confused (1993)
Watched: By myself right after Star Trek VI

Considering Richard Linklater now directs things like the Bad News Bears remake in addition to his indie efforts, and Dazed being his first studio film, I expected it to be more...I don't know...cogent?

It's aimless in a way that reminded me a lot of Slacker. On some level, I think it's cool that Linklater does stuff like that, but it's also hard for me to ever feel involved.
This movie felt exactly like being at a party full of high schoolers, which is impressive, but not particularly enjoyable.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Movie: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
Watched with: You really think I could get anyone else to watch Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country? Maybe Angelo...But no. It was just me.

I've seen this about a zillion times, but I actually didn't remember it well.

As it opens, the Klingon moon "Praxis" explodes and it is concluded that their empire will soon collapse. Considering this movie was released in 1991, even the densest scifi geek would have to comprehend the Cold War allegory.

Scifi stories evoke real world events, for purposes of satire or just generating plausible detail. The allegory works pretty well here, and I think it makes for a really interesting movie (and what's probably the most thoughtful in the series).

What it isn't, however, is Star Trek.
That's not a problem, exactly, but it makes it weird to watch.

If you've seen a single episode, you know that the purpose of the Enterprise is "To explore strange new worlds"--they may use a naval structure, but Starfleet isn't really a military per se.
In Undiscovered Country, the collapse of the Klingon-pire makes Uhura ask, "Are we talking about mothballing the Starfleet?"

Did they actually build all these ships for space age brinkmanship?

Similarly, the Klingons are not the noble warriors developed for the previous few years on The Next Generation but, essentially, space Russians. They're proud, slightly mysterious, and love to drink.
And as Wikipedia notes with its characteristic subtlety--
As the film was an allegory for the fall of the Soviet Union... ["penal asteroid"] Rura Penthe can be seen as an allegory for Soviet gulags when Captain Kirk and McCoy are brought to the camp the administrator (with an obvious Russian accent) says "Welcome to the gulag Rura Penthe".

The allegory becomes downright silly at times? Remember sneaky ole Colonel North of Iran/Contra fame?
Well, Star Trek VI would like you to meet Colonel freakin' West!

All of this is kind of silly, but more or less effective. It's pretty inarguably one of the best movies to bare the "Star Trek" name, but it seems like some kind of satirical post-modern variant, rather than an actual part of the franchise.
Which is fine.

Lawnmower Man

Movie: Lawnmower Man (1992)
Watched with: Angelo

I think the best possible credit a movie can have on IMDB is--
Writing credits
Stephen King (title only) (credit removed following lawsuit)

Wah waaah.

Lawnmower Man is kind of hilariously dated--people do get "absorbed" into virtual worlds (World of Warcraft, anyone?), but not because those environments are indistinguishable from reality (as Lawnmower suggests) but because, at least partially, of the social networks that interactive games create.

Anway.

I liked the way the notion that virtual reality was a method of tapping into a primal world rather than creating a new reality, but the movie's less about and more a kind of retarded (no pun intended) retread of Flowers for Algernon only with more clumsily-foreshadowed ass-kicking.

It's not a bad movie really, but both Angelo and I fell asleep toward the end.
Make of that what you will.

Strangers with Candy

Movie: Strangers with Candy (2006)
Watched with: My dad (yeah, I watched two movies in the same day, one with each parent)

I enjoyed this a great deal, but there's not a lot to say about it. The longer format made it a bit more awkward than the show, but all the leads are as funny as ever and slipped back into their characters perfectly.

I was kind of ambivalent about the celebrity cameos, particularly Matthew Broderick's, but they were all more or less amusing and fit the tone of the material. Ian "Mean Robot/Crazy Space Priest/Hobbit" Holm fit in well.

Basically, if you liked the show, I can't imagine why you wouldn't like the movie, and if you don't like the show, you suck and should rent them.

PS: The redhead girl is a babe.

Lady in the Water

Movie: Lady in the Water (2006)
Watched with: My mom

This movie isn't great or anything, but it's gotten way more shit than it deserves.

It's pretty, and interesting, and often (intentionally) funny. The cast of characters is diverse (racially, but I mean more in personality) and entertaining, and I like the way the whole community comes together to help with the problem.

It's a little bit stupid. "Narf" is not only a stupid name for a mythological creature, but also an obviously non-Asian one, so it sounds weird and wrong being pronounced by the heavily-accented Chinese (I think?) girl. Some of the plot twists were obvious or silly.

But it's also engaging and neat. M. Knight's cameo is not the masturbatory spectacle some have implied. He's a decent actor and the character isn't (to my eye) intended to be representative of the real M. Knight. He's a heroic writer, but he's a political theorist, not a "storyteller" as M. Knight seems to consider himself.

After the travesty that was The Village, Shyamalan really could only go up. But Lady is a neat movie in its own right, and people should really stop giving it such a hard time.

Vampire Wars: Battle for the Universe

Movie: Vampire Wars: Battle for the Universe (2005)
(aka Starship Troopers 3: Vampire Wars, which we nicknamed it because it's about people in space shooting stuff and has Michael Ironside in it.)

Watched with: John and Angelo

You know, I'm not going to try to convince you this is good, or even reall enjoyable, but Dracula 3000 set the bar for space vampire movies so low that I couldn't help but appreciate this one in contrast.

In the opening narration, the guy explains that humans discovered lots of lifeforms in space but "most of it was vampiric" so now Earth is an giant corporation that kills vampires. I'm not sure if the corporation was bad or the vampires were bad or both.
I kind of stopped paying attention.

I watched the DVD making-of featurette and the director talked about how he'd had the idea for years before finally getting to do it, and how much he loved the cast. Then the cast all explained their characters. The sexy vampire chick said her character was "very human".
I wonder if they were dissapointed by the finished movie, or if it was everything they hoped.