I just saw the trailer for The Fall and I have to say, it looks pretty damn cool.

Also as a side-note, as much as I tend to dislike gimmicky hipster t-shirts, I did get a kick out of this one.

[img]http://xs128.xs.to/xs128/08236/idrinkyour_fullpic_1610.gif[/img]

Fantastic.

K

Kung Fu Panda is awesome.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST: The famous crop duster scene -- which always seemed like it would be kind of silly to me -- worked a lot better than I thought it would. I really like the way Hitchcock set it up and executed it. He takes his time. It's a little dream-like. Vague echoes of The Birds (though didn't that come later?) -- a peaceful set-piece of iconographic elements mutating into a faceless and unexpectedly deadly enemy diving out of the sky. That realization of how oddly helpless you are against something you normally take for granted when it suddenly turns against you. Hitchcock does that well. The art auction scene is interesting, too. Hitchcock's good with managing and pacing his fictional situations. Of course none of that's news, and plot holes you could drive a truck through tend to abound, but hey. Eva Marie Saint's initial seduction of Grant is a thing to behold. It's saddening to compare it to what would pass for a comparable sequence today. James Mason was pretty awesome in his minor role.

I'm not sure I liked it as much as Notorious, or The Birds. But I liked it.

K

Bad Day at Black Rock is the shit.

I finally watched TWBB last night. You're right, that is a great t-shirt!

It really is. Really subtle and weird, but also funny.

What'd you think of the movie?

K

I liked it enough, but I'm not sure I get what Anderson was after. I sort of wish he had either stuck to making a character study or made the entire movie as weird and oddly compelling as that final scene. Daniel Day Lewis was terrific though, and his performance is reason enough to watch.

Last weekend I saw a Norwegian film called Reprise, which was superb. I'd love to see it again, but there's a lot of stuff out there that I feel I'm on the verge of missing.

Still...

It's a formally clever (but not overly flashy) look at what *might* be the results of two young hopefuls beginning their careers as authors. The first scene shows the fast friends standing a mailbox, dropping their first manuscripts in. What follows may or may not be the different paths each of their careers take. Everything may just be a story that an author made up...

Also, superbly acted, especially by the leads, who play complex roles -- two very different young men facing very different challenges, with varying degrees of internal resources, in the same stage of life.

A warning -- most of the major characters are male, and none of those men are particularly likable (altho one of the leads does, admittedly, garner much audience sympathy, due to his circumstances). So, you may leave the theatre feeling kinda icky about the guy-folks for a while...

Matthew

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD: It's like a character study without the study. This movie was fairly boring, it has no particular center of gravity; perplexing, to be sure, but not particularly intriguing. The narrator is awful, as is the narration. The final 15 minutes or so give a glimpse of what the movie could've been: an interesting exploration of an unglamorous and unappreciated assassination, and its effects upon the life of the man who thought it'd make him a hero. Instead we get two-and-a-half hours of garbled narrative conveyed via random-ish interactions between various characters who are never properly introduced to the audience and whose relationships with one another are never adequately developed. Moments of intended poignant dialogue fall flat; Pitt's James never makes particular sense as a character. Nor does Affleck's Ford for that matter. It all feels very clumsily handled somehow.

K

It probably says things I don't want to know about myself that the last three movies I saw in the theater were Wanted, Hancock and The Dark Knight.

I'm a big fan of both James McElroy and Morgan Freeman. I also dig Angelina Jolie for some reason, so the cast alone had me intrigued. The movie is full of totally implausible action that works anyway. It's a lot of fun. Apparently, the story works as well as it does because it bears almost no resemblance to the Mark Millar comics it was loosely based on. And I'm fine with that. Even if the curving bullets stuff is pretty silly.

Recommended.

Hancock is a fun, sweet movie that would have seemed even better if some of the funny parts hadn't been spoiled by the commercials. Will Smith is great as a depressed, alcoholic superhero who doesn't really care if he causes unintentional property damage. There's a love triangle subplot that takes up more of the movie than I expected, but I was satisfied.

Highly recommended.

The Dark Knight... I pretty much loved every character except Bale's version of Batman. Heath Ledger is incredible. Morgan Freeman is really cool as usual. Michael Caine is great. Gary Oldman is terrific once again as Gordon. Maggie Gyllenhall is a vast improvement over Katie Holmes. Aaron Eckhart is okay. Bale has some great bits when he's out of the costume, but as Batman... eh. The glider cape is cool, I guess. And it was cool when he fought those dogs.

I suspect that David Goyer's biggest contribution was coming up with weird ways to destroy stuff and kill people, but hey... it works.

Recommended.