Although I'm a follower of @NeilHimself, I haven't actually read a lot of his books. One I read that made me want to see the movie was Coraline (2008).
This is a stop-motion animated feature about a blue-haired girl named Coraline who moves into a ramshackle old boarding house in a rainy, dreary countryside. Her work-at-home parents are too busy for her and the neighbors are elderly theater-folk. The only kid her age around is an annoying wannabe punk named Wyborne. But one night Coraline finds a passage to another world.
In that world, the house is shiny and bright. Her father is whimsical and fun and Wybie can't talk. Her mother is cheerful and spends her time making Coraline her favorite food and stuffing her full. The neighbors put on magical performances. The only weird thing is that everyone has buttons for eyes.
The director, Harry Selick, did The Corpse Bride with Tim Burton and is a master of stop-motion animation - maybe the master. The look of the movie is inventive and fun, although some short sections had little jerky look to them. The only problem is that these days, you can do the same thing with computer animation, so I sometimes forgot I was watching real matter moving. The style was quite cartoonish, too - faces were a few spare lines, a lot of the design was sketched out simply, it would have been easy to computer animate. Plus, they seemed to use 3D printing to achieve some effects that would be hard conventionally. But regardless of the method, the final result looked great.
Dakota Fanning voiced Coraline, and made her some who I'd really like to get to know. Wybie was Robert Bailey, Jr. and his cat was Keith David (They Live). Mom and Dad were Teri Hatcher and John Hodgeman, and Ian McShane and French and Saunders voiced the theatrical neighbors.
Great story by Neil Gaiman, beautiful visuals from Selick.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Anty Raid
I don't know how, but I've managed to live my whole life without ever seeing Them! (1954), the greatest of all giant ant movies. As a child, I was too scared. A friend told me the story in gory detail, or maybe it was The Naked Jungle - either way, I vowed never to watch it. Once grown up, I guess I assumed it would be just camp. But it is still the Halloween season, so...
It starts in New Mexico, with police in a cruiser and a small plane surveying the desert, looking for a Russian ambassador -- wait, that's Beast of Yucca Flats. They find a little girl, mute and in shock, clutching a doll. All she will say is "Them!"
An odd animal track brings kindly old professor Edmund Gwenn and his beautiful daughter Joan Weldon on the scene. James Arness, representing the FBI, also shows up to be their foil, as they resolutely refuse to let him know what is going on, until one of Them shows up - a giant ant!
This is full of the cliches of bad 50s SF movies: The absent-minded professor and his beautiful daughter, the giant puppet monsters, "our weapons are powerless against them," etc. But the overall effect is actually quite suspenseful, and hardly cheesy at all. The noise the ants make, heard before they are seen, is very creepy, and the trip into their nest is legit scary. Or at least as scary as a mid-budget black-and-white monster movie gets.
I also liked Joan Weldon's character - she was tart and independent and as far as I recall, never needed rescuing - although she did remind me of the lady scientist in The Deadly Mantis. And speaking of giant grasshopper movies, James Arness looked and especially sounded so much like Peter Graves, I kept getting confused.
No, Peter Graves was not in this movie, but you may recognize an uncredited William Schallert (Trouble with Tribbles), and, to continue the Star Trek theme, a young Leonard Nimoy.
In conclusion, I had a lot of trouble coming up with a punny title for this - Should I have gone with "The Battle of Ant-Eat-Em"?
It starts in New Mexico, with police in a cruiser and a small plane surveying the desert, looking for a Russian ambassador -- wait, that's Beast of Yucca Flats. They find a little girl, mute and in shock, clutching a doll. All she will say is "Them!"
An odd animal track brings kindly old professor Edmund Gwenn and his beautiful daughter Joan Weldon on the scene. James Arness, representing the FBI, also shows up to be their foil, as they resolutely refuse to let him know what is going on, until one of Them shows up - a giant ant!
This is full of the cliches of bad 50s SF movies: The absent-minded professor and his beautiful daughter, the giant puppet monsters, "our weapons are powerless against them," etc. But the overall effect is actually quite suspenseful, and hardly cheesy at all. The noise the ants make, heard before they are seen, is very creepy, and the trip into their nest is legit scary. Or at least as scary as a mid-budget black-and-white monster movie gets.
I also liked Joan Weldon's character - she was tart and independent and as far as I recall, never needed rescuing - although she did remind me of the lady scientist in The Deadly Mantis. And speaking of giant grasshopper movies, James Arness looked and especially sounded so much like Peter Graves, I kept getting confused.
No, Peter Graves was not in this movie, but you may recognize an uncredited William Schallert (Trouble with Tribbles), and, to continue the Star Trek theme, a young Leonard Nimoy.
In conclusion, I had a lot of trouble coming up with a punny title for this - Should I have gone with "The Battle of Ant-Eat-Em"?
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
All You Zombies
We've been Jim Jarmusch fans since we stumbled upon Stranger Than Paradise in 1984. We haven't watched all his movies, but we usually enjoy his downbeat black-and-white no-wave style. So we were pretty psyched about Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), not just as an odd hipster vampire story, but mainly a chiaroscuro Jim Jarmusch movie in color.
It stars Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as ... undead creatures of the night (their condition is never named or discussed). Hiddleston is a reclusive rock-star, hiding out in deserted Detroit neighborhood. He calls mortal humans "zombies". His only connections to their world are the bootlegs of his work that leak out, and a fixer/connection who drops by with classic guitars and other necessities. But he only goes out of the house for blood. He doesn't hunt, however, he drops by the blood bank with a wad of cash to meet "Dr. Watson".
Swinton leads a more sociable life in Tangiers, hanging out in quiet nightspots with the locals and Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt) - yes, that Kit Marlowe, the one who wrote Shakespeare. But a phone call to Hiddleston sends her to join him.
Like most of Jarmusch, the story moves slowly, aimless. Things happen, amazing, horrifying, funny, tragic. But the story isn't exactly the point. We have Hiddleston's lair, filled with guitars and old electronics. Dark Tom and pale Tilda, wrapped up in one another. Candle light illuminating old crystal or faces, like a Rembrandt or Caravaggio. For such a supposedly detached director, Jarmusch has made a very warm movie.
Then there's the music, spare and sludgy. I thought it was White Stripes at first, especially when they went to visit Jack White's family home on their tour of Detroit. Or maybe there's an old R&B record, or a lute solo or Lebanese vocalist.
So, beautiful visuals, all filmed at night - warm, rich, decadent, somber night. Beautiful people with wild, tragic, brilliant, immortal lives. Beautiful fascinating music. And a story somewhere in among it all.
It stars Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as ... undead creatures of the night (their condition is never named or discussed). Hiddleston is a reclusive rock-star, hiding out in deserted Detroit neighborhood. He calls mortal humans "zombies". His only connections to their world are the bootlegs of his work that leak out, and a fixer/connection who drops by with classic guitars and other necessities. But he only goes out of the house for blood. He doesn't hunt, however, he drops by the blood bank with a wad of cash to meet "Dr. Watson".
Swinton leads a more sociable life in Tangiers, hanging out in quiet nightspots with the locals and Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt) - yes, that Kit Marlowe, the one who wrote Shakespeare. But a phone call to Hiddleston sends her to join him.
Like most of Jarmusch, the story moves slowly, aimless. Things happen, amazing, horrifying, funny, tragic. But the story isn't exactly the point. We have Hiddleston's lair, filled with guitars and old electronics. Dark Tom and pale Tilda, wrapped up in one another. Candle light illuminating old crystal or faces, like a Rembrandt or Caravaggio. For such a supposedly detached director, Jarmusch has made a very warm movie.
Then there's the music, spare and sludgy. I thought it was White Stripes at first, especially when they went to visit Jack White's family home on their tour of Detroit. Or maybe there's an old R&B record, or a lute solo or Lebanese vocalist.
So, beautiful visuals, all filmed at night - warm, rich, decadent, somber night. Beautiful people with wild, tragic, brilliant, immortal lives. Beautiful fascinating music. And a story somewhere in among it all.
Monday, November 9, 2015
Rant On
It strikes me that I haven't complained about Netflix in a while, so I'd better remedy that. If you recall, my last complaint was that they were sending me extra disks, which is pretty weak sauce. So today, my topic will be "Selection". Join me, won't you?
The promise of Netflix was: Every damn movie you can think of. If it has been released on DVD or Blu-ray, Netflix will send it to you in a reasonable amount of time. Then, Netflix decided to get into streaming. The promise: We have a bunch of stuff, not all of it bottom-of-the-barrel drek. You can watch it right now! It probably isn't what you want to watch, but maybe it's something almost as good!
That's fine, I pay for streaming and use it to watch old TV shows (like last year's Arrow and Flash). But I expect the DVDs to meet my serious film-watching needs. I have a queue of 143 disks waiting to be watched. At the rate of 2-3/week, I'll never run out of movies to watch. But my "Saved" list - movies I want to watch but aren't available on Netflix, is 103 movies. Some of these are movies that just haven't come out yet. Those will go onto the queue in good time.
But some of them have been there forever, and I don't know if they are ever coming off. Yellow Submarine. Greaser's Palace. California Split. Sure, some of these are obscure or rare. But Speed, for goodness sake. You can't rent or stream Keanu Reaves' greatest commercial hit!
Furthermore, the list is getting longer all the time - not because I am adding to it, but because movies that were available on my regular queue have fallen down into Saved. I suspect that movies are dropping to Saved faster than they are ascending from there to the Queue. And of course, there are the "Short wait", "Long wait", and "Very long wait" items. I've had a "Short wait" movie (Bela Lugosi collection with The Black Cat) at the top of my queue for 6 weeks, still no sign of it. "Long wait" items usually just stay that way for a year or two, then drop to Saved.
I forsee a future when you get a small selection on Netflix, along with some Netflix "Originals" (which have been quite good, I have to say). Other services will have locked up other content, the way Hulu locked up Criterion. That breaks the Netflix monopoly, but not in a good way.
OK, maybe I'm getting all worked up over nothing. You know, like "The food is terrible and the portions are too small." There are still more great movies on Netflix than I'll ever watch. But I was promised EVERYTHING!
Rant off.
Update: Coincidentally, Todd Van Der Werff on Vox wrote about this very topic, and refers to Jon Brooks of KQED from last year. Still think I'm just a crank?
The promise of Netflix was: Every damn movie you can think of. If it has been released on DVD or Blu-ray, Netflix will send it to you in a reasonable amount of time. Then, Netflix decided to get into streaming. The promise: We have a bunch of stuff, not all of it bottom-of-the-barrel drek. You can watch it right now! It probably isn't what you want to watch, but maybe it's something almost as good!
That's fine, I pay for streaming and use it to watch old TV shows (like last year's Arrow and Flash). But I expect the DVDs to meet my serious film-watching needs. I have a queue of 143 disks waiting to be watched. At the rate of 2-3/week, I'll never run out of movies to watch. But my "Saved" list - movies I want to watch but aren't available on Netflix, is 103 movies. Some of these are movies that just haven't come out yet. Those will go onto the queue in good time.
But some of them have been there forever, and I don't know if they are ever coming off. Yellow Submarine. Greaser's Palace. California Split. Sure, some of these are obscure or rare. But Speed, for goodness sake. You can't rent or stream Keanu Reaves' greatest commercial hit!
Furthermore, the list is getting longer all the time - not because I am adding to it, but because movies that were available on my regular queue have fallen down into Saved. I suspect that movies are dropping to Saved faster than they are ascending from there to the Queue. And of course, there are the "Short wait", "Long wait", and "Very long wait" items. I've had a "Short wait" movie (Bela Lugosi collection with The Black Cat) at the top of my queue for 6 weeks, still no sign of it. "Long wait" items usually just stay that way for a year or two, then drop to Saved.
I forsee a future when you get a small selection on Netflix, along with some Netflix "Originals" (which have been quite good, I have to say). Other services will have locked up other content, the way Hulu locked up Criterion. That breaks the Netflix monopoly, but not in a good way.
OK, maybe I'm getting all worked up over nothing. You know, like "The food is terrible and the portions are too small." There are still more great movies on Netflix than I'll ever watch. But I was promised EVERYTHING!
Rant off.
Update: Coincidentally, Todd Van Der Werff on Vox wrote about this very topic, and refers to Jon Brooks of KQED from last year. Still think I'm just a crank?
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Cold Comfort
I'll admit, I just put on Iceman (2013) for a whim - It starred Donnie Yen, how bad could it be? Spoiler: Not bad at all, but kind of weird.
It starts with a truck crash, and 3 cryo-chambers break open, releasing ancient warriors Yen and two of his enemies upon modern Hong Kong. The tone is set when Yen celebrates his revival by pissing like a firehose "the full length of the parking lot." Well, he has been asleep for 300 years. So action-comedy.
Dressed as an ancient warrior, our hero strides downtown, where it is fortunately Halloween so his costume doesn't rate much attention. There he meets a drunken party girl (Shengyi Huang, dressed as an old-timey princess, natch) and falls under her wing. In the meantime, the badguy icemen are hanging out with roughnecks and kill a policeman.
So, action comedy with a distessingly cold attitude towards murder.
This odd mismatch of tone and content gave me problems throughout the movie. Maybe it reads differently to Hong Kong Chinese.
Of course, it has great wirework action sequences. The icemen are supernatural strong and talented - as Yen says, "Why are people in this time so weak?" There is also a plot, with one or two mystic McGuffins, but I think you'll be more interested in the romance with Shengyi Huang, who gets to be a strong presence, while staying resolutely ditzy and shallow. We saw her last with Jet Li in The Sorcerer and the White Snake.
I didn't mind watching this, but it is not going to do Yen's reputation much good. It seems this is a remake of The Iceman Cometh with Yuen Biao. I'm willing to watch that.
It starts with a truck crash, and 3 cryo-chambers break open, releasing ancient warriors Yen and two of his enemies upon modern Hong Kong. The tone is set when Yen celebrates his revival by pissing like a firehose "the full length of the parking lot." Well, he has been asleep for 300 years. So action-comedy.
Dressed as an ancient warrior, our hero strides downtown, where it is fortunately Halloween so his costume doesn't rate much attention. There he meets a drunken party girl (Shengyi Huang, dressed as an old-timey princess, natch) and falls under her wing. In the meantime, the badguy icemen are hanging out with roughnecks and kill a policeman.
So, action comedy with a distessingly cold attitude towards murder.
This odd mismatch of tone and content gave me problems throughout the movie. Maybe it reads differently to Hong Kong Chinese.
Of course, it has great wirework action sequences. The icemen are supernatural strong and talented - as Yen says, "Why are people in this time so weak?" There is also a plot, with one or two mystic McGuffins, but I think you'll be more interested in the romance with Shengyi Huang, who gets to be a strong presence, while staying resolutely ditzy and shallow. We saw her last with Jet Li in The Sorcerer and the White Snake.
I didn't mind watching this, but it is not going to do Yen's reputation much good. It seems this is a remake of The Iceman Cometh with Yuen Biao. I'm willing to watch that.
Thursday, November 5, 2015
Furious Road
We were in a hurry to watch Furious 7 (2015) so we could listen to the How Did This Get Made podcast, but we were going to watch it as soon as it came out anyway.
This installment opens with Jason Statham talking to his comatose brother in the hospital, vowing vengeance on Torreto and the Fast and Furious gang. Yes, the Transporter is going to be the bad guy. And The Rock is after him, of course, and then KURT RUSSELL shows up as the Agent Coulson guy, and we are so on board. (OK, we were on board starting around Tokyo Drift and never got off.)
It seems Djimon Hounsou has kidnapped the world's greatest hacker and her Eye of God track-anyone McGuffin (so much like the ARGUS in TV's Arrow). If the F&F gang get her back, Kurt Russell promises to let them use it to track down Statham.
Which is pointless, because he is following them around. They don't need to find him, they just need to stand in one place for a minute. Heck, why am I bothering you with plot? They drive a sports car out of one skyscraper and into the next. Then they do it again to the next skyscraper. They run their cars straight into each other head on, or off a cliff and just shake it off. Stunt after stunt, explosions, fights, bigger and better, over two hours of it.
Along with Russell and Statham, they squeeze in Ronda Rousey and Tony Jaa, but only for one fight each. Still, this series is getting to be like The Expendables - let's get as many action stars in as possible. On the other hand, they killed off Han (Sung Kang) and his girl Giselle (Gal Gadot), which is a shame, because they are great.
Of course, Paul Walker died during the filming of this movie. They do a good job covering this up with Shemps and CGI - I don't think I ever noticed it. But there was a lot about him retiring to be a family man, most of it kind of silly ("he misses the bullets" - as long as they miss you, dude).
The other emotional arc is Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), who still has amnesia and, you know, likes Dom and all, but doesn't remember being in love with him. This is not handled all that well, in addition to which, she doesn't get much to do. This is the worst waste in the movie.
And it all ends up with Walker and Diesel saying goodbye in a way that made no sense to me - Dom leaves everybody at a beach party, including Letty, and Paul comes after him. Why? Who knows, I guess it seemed iconic. Then there is a farewell to Paul Walker song that didn't really do much for me and roll the credits.
I guess they'll do the next one without Walker - at least I hope they don't scrape up any old footage to recycle. He will be missed and it won't be the same. But with enough explosions, I will barely notice.
This installment opens with Jason Statham talking to his comatose brother in the hospital, vowing vengeance on Torreto and the Fast and Furious gang. Yes, the Transporter is going to be the bad guy. And The Rock is after him, of course, and then KURT RUSSELL shows up as the Agent Coulson guy, and we are so on board. (OK, we were on board starting around Tokyo Drift and never got off.)
It seems Djimon Hounsou has kidnapped the world's greatest hacker and her Eye of God track-anyone McGuffin (so much like the ARGUS in TV's Arrow). If the F&F gang get her back, Kurt Russell promises to let them use it to track down Statham.
Which is pointless, because he is following them around. They don't need to find him, they just need to stand in one place for a minute. Heck, why am I bothering you with plot? They drive a sports car out of one skyscraper and into the next. Then they do it again to the next skyscraper. They run their cars straight into each other head on, or off a cliff and just shake it off. Stunt after stunt, explosions, fights, bigger and better, over two hours of it.
Along with Russell and Statham, they squeeze in Ronda Rousey and Tony Jaa, but only for one fight each. Still, this series is getting to be like The Expendables - let's get as many action stars in as possible. On the other hand, they killed off Han (Sung Kang) and his girl Giselle (Gal Gadot), which is a shame, because they are great.
Of course, Paul Walker died during the filming of this movie. They do a good job covering this up with Shemps and CGI - I don't think I ever noticed it. But there was a lot about him retiring to be a family man, most of it kind of silly ("he misses the bullets" - as long as they miss you, dude).
The other emotional arc is Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), who still has amnesia and, you know, likes Dom and all, but doesn't remember being in love with him. This is not handled all that well, in addition to which, she doesn't get much to do. This is the worst waste in the movie.
And it all ends up with Walker and Diesel saying goodbye in a way that made no sense to me - Dom leaves everybody at a beach party, including Letty, and Paul comes after him. Why? Who knows, I guess it seemed iconic. Then there is a farewell to Paul Walker song that didn't really do much for me and roll the credits.
I guess they'll do the next one without Walker - at least I hope they don't scrape up any old footage to recycle. He will be missed and it won't be the same. But with enough explosions, I will barely notice.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Zombie Movie
Robert A. Heinlein is called the Dean of Science Fiction, but he is not well represented in the movies: 1950s drive-in fare Destination: Moon and parody/fiasco Starship Troopers. Now we have Predestination (2015), and it's done right.
I went in having read the source story "-All You Zombies-" so the whole thing was thoroughly spoilerated for me: It follows the source very closely. I think it might be a better experience if you've read the story, but I'm not going to spoilerize it in this post, except for two points:
I do think you can enjoy the movie without knowing any Heinlein. It has nice retro look and Ethan Hawke as the bartender and Sarah Snook as the Unwed Mother have nice parts. The wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff is handled well - beats Looper in my opinion. And at it's heart, it's a romance, although a pretty kinky one. If you've read much Heinlein, especially the later stuff, you know he had some pretty specific kinks, and this caters to a lot of them at once.
This is a low-medium budget Australian production - no big effects, little action. It was directed by the Spierig twins. This is only their third film, but it looks like they have some art/genre cred; heck, they got Ethan Hawke.
So, great Heinlein adaptation, maybe great movie. If there's anyone out there who hasn't read the story but has seen the movie, please let me know what the experience is like.
In conclusion, IMDB reminds me that they made a movie out of Puppetmasters, Heinlein's pod-people story. Guess I have to check that out too.
I went in having read the source story "-All You Zombies-" so the whole thing was thoroughly spoilerated for me: It follows the source very closely. I think it might be a better experience if you've read the story, but I'm not going to spoilerize it in this post, except for two points:
- This is a time-travel story. The opening scenes don't exactly make this clear. You might figure it out or you might just get confused. The movie doesn't really explain what's going on, and I'm a little dim, so I was glad to know this going in.
- Like the original story, it is framed by a story a man is telling in a bar. Yes, the movie gets it: A guy walks into a bar is a lame way to start a joke. But the man's story starts "When I was young girl..." and it's off to the races.
I do think you can enjoy the movie without knowing any Heinlein. It has nice retro look and Ethan Hawke as the bartender and Sarah Snook as the Unwed Mother have nice parts. The wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff is handled well - beats Looper in my opinion. And at it's heart, it's a romance, although a pretty kinky one. If you've read much Heinlein, especially the later stuff, you know he had some pretty specific kinks, and this caters to a lot of them at once.
This is a low-medium budget Australian production - no big effects, little action. It was directed by the Spierig twins. This is only their third film, but it looks like they have some art/genre cred; heck, they got Ethan Hawke.
So, great Heinlein adaptation, maybe great movie. If there's anyone out there who hasn't read the story but has seen the movie, please let me know what the experience is like.
In conclusion, IMDB reminds me that they made a movie out of Puppetmasters, Heinlein's pod-people story. Guess I have to check that out too.
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