For our last Bad Movie Night, we watched Clue, which several of us had never seen. I rather enjoyed it. I thought the writing was hilarious and the character acting by the large ensemble cast was pitch-perfect.

Of course famously the film has three endings, all of which we watched. Even though the third ending is, in my opinion, far and away the most plausible and satisfying, I find the concept of multiple endings to be pretty intriguing.

I mean think about it. Imagine seeing Clue in 1985, knowing nothing about the multiple-ending gimmick. You catch the film on a Wed. night, and then at work the next day you start discussing with your coworker. "Man, I totally knew that Miss Scarlett did it," you say. "Are you kidding?!?" he retorts, "it was Mrs. Peacock!"

The discussion which ensued before the two of you straightened things out would be fascinating.

Sadly, as far as my Googling can turn up, people going into the theater probably knew there were multiple endings as the gimmick was part of the marketing. That's a missed opportunity for a unique social experiment, as far as I'm concerned!

Maybe the time is ripe to try it for real.

The fact is, it's fairly common for a film to have multiple endings. Many, many films get reshoots after initial test screenings. When audiences react badly to an ending, it's not uncommon for the studio to demand that a new one be cut together. (Going strictly by DVD special features, it's my experience that these changes are virtually always for the better, studio interference notwithstanding.)

Meanwhile, international and foreign films are sometimes released with actual multiple endings. It's not unheard of for a film that had an ambiguous or downer ending in its original release to turn up in the US with a happy ending, at least of sorts.

If you've ever watched the 'alternate ending' on your special edition DVD, the changes in tone that a new ending supplies can be striking. A different ending can change a film from a cerebral thriller to a frenetic action flick. It can have you leaving the theater with a sense of confusion or an air of satisfaction. It can be the line between whether a film was brilliant or absurd.

The ending is the last thing you see in the movie, so it is going to have a disproportionate impact on how you perceive the tone of a movie. If the ending has a disproportionate amount of action, you're more inclined to think of what you've just seen as an 'action movie'. If the ending is happy, you're more inclined to label the movie as 'upbeat', even if everything that came before was doldrums and depression.

Even more importantly, for many films, is that the ending explains or interprets the rest of the film. Clue is of course a sterling example of this. There are three different explanations for the events that lead up to the climax, and three different reinterpretations of the characters involved.

Finally, and I think this is of paramount importance, the ending decides the themes of the film. Every story is a problem in search of a resolution. How that resolution is achieved is thematically significant. A story where all the bad guys get what's coming to them has strong themes of good versus evil and justice. This is a world where morality triumphs, the world that we all, theoretically, want to live in.

Take the same story, but now the good guys are killed too. Now you have themes of sacrifice and you find yourself living in a more tragic world. And then sometimes the story ends with the bad guys winning, or people just dying at random. These stories tend to ponder existential themes - who are we? Do we really matter? What does it mean to be human?

These are just a few examples. There are many different possibly themes to a story, and even more endings that get you there. But the point is that tweaking an ending even slightly could radically alter our perception of a movie.

I think it would be very cool for someone to release a movie that really played with that. Shoot two or three different endings and send different prints to different theaters. Don't tell anyone that you're doing it. Watch the confusion that results.

The key would be to make the endings differ in subtle ways: reordering key events, or emphasizing different things. I think a straight up happy ending versus sad ending would be too obvious, too quickly figured out. Likewise an ending where everyone turned out to be space aliens or where it was all a dream. Keep it subtle, just enough to twist the viewers' perceptions and expectations of the film they just saw.

Then see what people have to say.

Audience Participation: What kind of ending do you like best. Which was your favorite ending to Clue?

I just saw the most amazing teenage vampire movie.

No, not that teenage vampire movie. The other one. The Swedish one.

Let The Right One In is a quiet, gently paced film punctuated occasionally by some incredibly striking images: the girl in the tree, the body in the ice, the woman in the hospital room and of course The Pool Scene. You should watch the movie just to see The Pool Scene.

Maybe the best part is Eli's eyes, though. They're hard to catch in the act, but in some scenes there's something not quite right with them. But hey, that's what DVDs are for. Rewind and slow-mo are your friends here.

Eli is a highlight for me. She's withdrawn and dark at times, but still has enough warmth to be convincing as a twelve-year-old (ish) girl. When Oskar asks her if she's really twelve and she says "Yes, it's just I've been twelve for a very long time," I completely believe her.

I'm doing this review backwards, aren't I? Ok: Oskar is a spindly pre-teen in Communist Sweden in 1982. He endures constant bullying at school and fantasizes about revenge, but has no friends to sympathize with him. That is, until a girl named Eli and her adult caretaker move into a flat in Oskar's housing block. Eli is nice to him, but her home life seems a little strange and she's only around at night. Meanwhile, the little suburb where they live is being scandalized by a series of gruesome murders.

They say that in storytelling you should "Show, don't tell." Better advice still is probably "Don't show, imply." This is a film that's pregnant with implication. Our POV is Oskar's, but there are things that are happening just outside of his twelve-year-old perspective that are beyond his understanding. If this film was about adults, it would be a much darker film, a horror film. But the story of these two young, troubled teens manages to be rather sweet.

Kristin Thompson of The Frodo Franchise has an exellent long article on the push to get 3D films and projectors into movie theaters. Director James Cameron's upcoming sci-fi set-piece Avatar has been filmed in 3D and Cameron is pushing really, really hard to get theaters to convert to the technology to play the film. Hit up the link to get the scoop on the chances of The Hobbit and other franchises getting the treatment.

I'm curious to know what people think about seeing films in 3D. How much would it excite you to watch Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings or Braveheart on a big screen in three dimensions?

I find that personally I'm quite blasé when it comes right down to it. I've never watched any of the aforementioned films and thought, "Gee, that was awesome, but I wish it had been 3D!" In fairness to the technology, I've never seen a modern example of it. Maybe that would change my mind. But as far as I'm concerned, nothing is 'missing' from my film-viewing experience at the theater, unless it's a handheld EMP-device to fry annoying mobile phones.

And not everyone who has tried it is gung-ho about it. Roger Ebert is quite eloquent in his dislike of the technology.

My mom and I watched the latest Harry Potter on a standard IMAX screen yesterday*. Watching anything in IMAX means you're practically lost in the screen. During one of the opening scenes the camera zips through the streets of London at a rollercoaster pace, and it certainly felt 3D enough for me! I leaned over to mom and whispered, "Remember, if it bothers you just close your eyes."

"Oh, I already did!" she assured me.

Bottom line for me is that I already find a good old-fashioned 2D film to be plenty immersive. 3D may be something that I simply don't need in my cinema-going experience.

But I suppose I'll have to give it a try first.

* In case you're curious, yes, I am the Best Son Ever.

One of the first things I did since getting back to the States was to restore my Netflix subscription. It's letting me slowly catch up on the films I missed while I was in Europe, and the ability to stream episodes of Dexter is also a plus.

I'm a bit slow - it sometimes takes me a week to get around to watching whatever the current DVD in my mailbox is - but what's the point of being able to watch films and return them at your leisure if you can't do it, you know, at your leisure?

Anyway, last night's movie was Gran Torino. Short version: Retired Dirty Harry threatens snotty kids with shotgun, tells them to get off his lawn. What's not to love? Listening to Clint Eastwood's rasp is a bit of a chore, as I found myself constantly wanting to clear my throat. Seriously, it doesn't sound like a voice so much as rattlesnake slithering through a pile of sandpaper. And I saw the ending coming, more or less, about half way in.

But it's still worth watching. It's the story of a bitter, lonely old man who finds friendship, redemption and even some racial reconciliation with his Hmong neighbors. And they find... something they didn't expect. A heart of gold, maybe?

I dug it.

Next up: Duplicity!

About a year ago, I predicted that there was no way that the Watchmen movie could be good.

I finally got around to seeing it last night, on DVD. And... I largely stand by my statement. Saying that a film "can't be good" is a harsh statement, perhaps. And Watchmen is definitely interesting in a way that many films aren't. But as an artifact of film-making, it's just not that great. Between the constant intercutting between scenes (required for a story as dense with information as this one), the dozens of bit players and the constant philosophizing it just wasn't a very engaging film. You watch it for two-and-a-half hours and think, "huh."

I'd heard that Zack Snyder was changing the ending and was hoping for good things from this, but the new ending is not terribly different from the original. Maybe slightly less weird (the whole psychic space squid thing always felt jarringly out of place to me) but basically it's the same concept.

But here's the real reason that Watchmen doesn't and won't ever work as a movie: movies are too short.

There are many mediums for storytelling, and I love them all, and study them even as I enjoy them: oral storytelling, the written word, the stage, television, film, graphic novels, interactive fiction, video games (yes, it's true). None is better than the others, but certain mediums lend themselves more effectively to certain types of stories. This is something that auteurs of all stripes seem to forget, although filmmakers may be the most egregiously guilty.

The problem with the kind of story that Watchmen is telling is that it's extremely dense. There is a lot of information to transfer to the reader/viewer. Watchmen needs a medium which lends itself to long-form, episodic storytelling. Film is just not that medium.

If you insist on telling the story visually, television would probably work. I could definitely see a Watchmen mini-series, filmed documentary-style, being very engaging. But trying to compress the thing into a single arc that can be consumed in one sitting is a mistake. This is also true of books like Dune, which has been defeating directors since David Lynch tackled it in the 80's.

I think that authors, directors, playwrites, etc. need to learn to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the storytelling mediums and select stories for them accordingly. Here's my (incomplete) categorization of those mediums:

• Novels: the novel is perhaps the most versatile of storytelling mediums.  It shines across many genres and styles, it accommodates more experimental forms well, it handles both complex stories and minimalist stories with equal aplomb.  For all that, it is not a visual medium and it is also possibly the least 'accessible' of the mediums, requiring a large investment from the reader.  The novel is of course one sub-genre of the medium of the written word, which also includes short stories, poems, and many, many others.
• Film/Television: film on the other hand is an extremely 'transparent' medium.  It shines at absorbing the viewer so completely that they simply lose sight of the artifice of storytelling.  Stories with strong visual components of course work well on film.  But film is a bad way to communicate lots of hard, specific information or a large number of important characters.  It also has trouble dealing with the element of time: everything in a film or TV show has a feeling of immediacy, as if it is happening Right Now.  Because of this, stories with lots of flashbacks or which unfold over a long period of time are trickier.
• Graphic novels: in many ways the graphic novels' hybrid of imagery and text brings together the best parts of both film and the written word.  The visual component is engaging but the textual component allows for the communication of a lot of complexity.  There is also no real restriction on length, so long-form stories are possible.  Graphic novels really shine at illustrating sequences of events and contextualizing images within time.  But although this medium does the jobs of both film and novels, it isn't as good at either job as they are.  Also, graphic novels ultimately have to make a choice about which 'parent' medium they want to emulate.  So an information-heavy 'novel'-style graphic novel will be less effective visually, and vice versa.
• The Stage: plays impose lots of interesting limitations on the stories that can be told.  Long form storytelling, for instance, is almost always not an option.  There are also lots of hard limits on the kinds of settings and action that can be shown, as it must all be realized in real time using props and human beings.  That said, there is something so engaging about seeing real people in real life act out a story.  Historically, this has been the most accessible of all mediums and it remains a potent force today.  It also offers a surprising number of sub-genres: the musical, the one act play, the opera.
• Video games/interactive fiction: far and away the youngest of mediums, this is also one of the trickiest and most complex.  While there already exist several compelling examples of 'interactive' storytelling, I suspect that we have not even begun to plum the depths of this medium and will not for some time.  The idea of giving over a great deal of control over the story to the 'reader' is alien to most auteurs, and presents many unique challenges.  At the same time, however, allowing the 'viewer' to literally be a character in the story is the holy grail of storytelling.  And since this is the one medium that truly offers that ability, it's worth exploring.

Watchmen is a story about history, albeit an alternate history.  History is hard to capture on celluloid, and is not well served by compression into movie length.  I just don't think this kind of story works as a conventional big screen flick.

Alan Moore's genius was to write a story that took full advantage of his chosen medium, graphic novels.  Because of that it's always going to work best as a graphic novel.  That's not to say that translation to other mediums can't be attempted with interesting results, but I doubt that such translations can ever measure up to the original.

I would like to 'pimp' my cousin's 'weblog', wherein he reviews 'flicks' such as 'Star Trek 11'.

Living in California has naturally exposed Zach to a lot of films and filmmaking. Being from the same genetic stock as me has naturally predisposed him to be brilliant. So, he has a lot of insightful things to say.

For instance, he and some friends put together an additional 'podcast'* about the movie which you may also find insightful.

It's also possible that you are SO OVER Star Trek, but I just finally got around to seeing it last night. My thoughts generally line up with my cousins so I won't rehash that stuff. It was 'aight. I'm still a Next Generation guy, though.

* I'll stop doing that now, I promise.

BPS Digest has a short post about some new research that evaluated the opinions of film students, amateur film reviewers and professional film reviewers on almost 700 films.

[They] discovered a continuum of overlapping opinion with the experts being the harshest judges, followed by the amateur critics, while the students were the most generous.

A further finding to emerge was that undergrads who'd watched more films tended to provide harsher ratings, but these were still more generous on average than the amateur and professional critics.

I don't think this phenomenon is surprising at all. My general experience is that people who listen to more music are more critical of music, people who eat more fine cuisine are more critical of food and, yes, that people who are heavily invested in consuming a lot of film make harsher movie critics.

To take myself as an example, I listen to a lot of music compared to a hypothetical American listener who mostly just plays the radio and, say, really likes U2. My musical tastes are likely much more selective than this person. On the other hand, a hipster who writes for a webzine and attends shows every weekend is going to be bored by much of what I like. This puts me in a bad spot - perpetually annoyed by both music critics and fans alike. The solution is no doubt to listen to either a lot MORE or a lot LESS music.

To get back to film criticism, I wonder if this information should be used to select the type of critic you pay attention too. For instance, I've long followed independent west coast film reviewer and humor writer Eric D. Snider. For a long time his opinions on film and mine were closely aligned, divided only by my marked preference for Kung-Fu anything. However, I would say that in recent years we've drifted apart.

If consuming more media really does make you a harsher critic of that media, then this is not surprising. At the beginning of this year Snider reported that he watched 430 movies in 2008! 430! That's WELL over a movie a day.

Meanwhile, my movie intake is nowhere NEAR that, even at the best of times. Let's go back to 2007/2008 where I was living as a bachelor, had a Netflix subscription, and was regularly attending Bad Movie Nights with my friends. At that time I was watching maybe three films a week. On a good week. And I certainly didn't sustain that pace over an entire year. Ordinarily, I'd say I watch about two films per month.

The point is that Snider's movie intake is greater than mine by several orders of magnitude, and the gap is only increasing. So, according to the findings of this study, I should trust him less and less. We're both becoming more selective in our tastes in film as we watch more movies, but he is doing so much more rapidly than I am!

Given that I don't see that many movies myself, I want to see only the really good stuff. So it's probably okay for me to rely on a critic whose tastes are somewhat more selective than my own. Then, by following his or her recommendations I can see the creme of the crop of movies. But I don't want a critic who is SO selective that they are screening out films I would genuinely enjoy.

Hmm, someone should work out a formula for this. If I want to watch N films in a year, I need a critic who watches X films per year divided by Y films to which that critic gave a thumbs up multiplied by Z number of years as a professional critic plus K, where K is how much that critic likes Kung Fu films. Or something like that.

More practically, maybe I need to shop around for an online film critic who is a little fresher off the shelf, if only to back up our seasoned veteran. Any suggestions?

This post was written slightly tongue-in-cheek. The author would like to note that he still values Snider's opinion, even when it differs from mine. I guess I've been reading the guy long enough that I can form a pretty good opinion of the film based on his response to it.

As much as I love Robert Downey Jr., this is NOT Sherlock Holmes.

Will this film feature actual following clues and solving mysteries at some point? Or is that old hat?

I thought that the tone of Eric D. Snider's review of Wolverine was a bit curmudgeonly (it's a comic book movie for frick's sake) but agreed with his overall assessment of it:

As a standalone, though, it's loud, chaotic, and goofy, one of the more negligible entries in the comic-book genre.

Watching it, I got the feeling that I was about ten years too old to really be in that sweet spot of amped-up testosterone-fueled action-movie enjoyment. I felt as though this template of PG-13 Hollywood Action Movie had been jammed onto it. It needed to be either a lot grittier and psychological, or a smidge more light-hearted and breezy.

I think there were some genuinely good ideas buried in there. With a little tweaking I think this could have been a winner. For instance, I'm sure that I was not the only person who wanted to see more of the Mutant Black Ops team. I'd watch that movie! Also, Wolverine's brother managed to be an interesting character in spite of being fairly one-dimensional. Then there's the fact that the dude has fought in every major American war of the past 150 years. THAT has some interesting implications.

But mostly the movie is intent on rushing through all this and getting to the part where Wolverine wakes up with a headache and no memories and decides to become an X-man.

One of the places where I'd part ways with Mr. Snider is this:

I get the feeling the film was made exclusively for hardcore fans of the "X-Men" comics. It is rife with characters, events, and details that have nothing to do with what's going on but that have clearly been included to produce fanboy salivation. That's good pandering, but bad filmmaking.

I disagree. I have very little detailed, comic-book geek knowledge of the X-men canon, but I really enjoyed that stuff. And wanted more.

Comic book movies have received a huge boon in the past couple years. And not from CGI technology, like you might expect, but from people like J.J. Abrams. Thanks to shows like Lost and its imitators, today's film consumers are a lot more willing to put up with and even expect complicated mythologies and sophisticated, twisting plots. Oh, and lots of characters.

I like that the recent Marvel films are willing to indulge in this kind of thing. It reminds people watching comic book movies about what we like so much about... comic books.

Tip from The Frodo Franchise:

It's official that the two prequels to the Lord of the Rings being filmed will be just The Hobbit, in two parts. I think I'm fairly positive on that decision. Part of me really loved the idea of the second film being 'tabula rasa', a blank slate in Tolkien's world on which new stories could be written. But harsh experience has taught us all, I think, that there's so, SO many ways that that can go wrong.

At any rate, with two films to fill it looks like they are going to expand the scope of The Hobbit to include the events surrounding Dol Guldur and other hints at the larger backdrop of the Third Age.

I'm down with that.

By the way, if you haven't already you need to go Netflix Pan's Labyrinth and and find out why Guilermo Del Toro is the man for this job. Fantastic journeys through strange worlds are just what he DOES.

I have some news which I need to breathlessly impart to you.

Ahem.

OMG OMG THEY ARE MAKING AN ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT MOVIE!!!11111111111

C'mon, you know it's gonna be brilliant.

Feel free to submit your AD quotes as comments. Here's mine:

GEORGE SR: Gob, I don't have time for your tricks.
GOB: Illusions, dad. You don't have time for my illusions.

Here's looking forward to the further antics of America's most hilariously dysfunctional family.

So I finally got around to seeing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This isn't going to be a review as such because I expect most people here have already seen it, but I did have some thoughts. And a question. So hang on until the end because I'd like to get your take on it.

I was privileged to get to see this film at The Movies, which is located in downtown Amsterdam and is one of the world's oldest cinemas. Very good experience. The seating wasn't anything special and the screen wasn't much larger than some people's flatscreen TV's, but the atmosphere was stellar - old wood and red carpet as far as the eye could see. Plus, you could drink beer while watching the movie*.

The film itself, well - you should definitely see it, if you haven't. Take any criticisms I have with that foundation in your mind.

Now the idea of A Man Aging Backwards is such an intriguing one that it's hard to see how you could make a bad movie out of it. Get a committee of 'comedy' writers, insert Rob Schneider or Eddie Murphy as your lead, and write a bunch of fart jokes around the concept and you'd STILL have a decent flick. Or, you could hire a lone auteur like Charlie Kauffman and you could get a really brilliant classic of cinema.

The actual Benjamin Button falls somewhere in the middle. It's good, but it's not the best film that could have been made about this.

( Killing Brad Pitt... )

Okay, I promised you a question.

It seems to me that literature and film have a major and notable difference between them. In literature, we generally accept that the authors who sell the most and the authors who write the classics are going to be on separate lists. The bestseller lists are full of Tom Clancys, Dean Koontzes and the occasional Stephanie Meyer. But very few would argue that those authors represent the best that fiction has to offer. That category belongs to writers like J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, who top the bestseller lists a lot less frequently.

This doesn't seem to hold in filmmaking.

Generally, if you start rattling off names of the major-league directors - Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Peter Jackson, Steven Soderberg, M. Night Shyamalan, Ridley Scott - you'll only come up with a handful that people would argue don't have genuine artistic talent. Michael Bay is the only big name that immediately springs to mind. Maybe Joel Schumacher.

But the point is that I suspect that in Hollywood the lists of Best Directors and Best-Selling Directors isn't all that different.

So here's my question: Why is that? Why are literature's hacks it's bestsellers while in filmmaking the auteurs also bring in the big bucks?

Obviously, all these directors have made pictures that were 'risks' and that didn't do so well financially. But they've also all been given the reins on gigantic blockbusters - often after their less successful but more creatively daring efforts. Relevant example: David Fincher makes critically acclaimed cult films like Fight Club and Zodiac in between hits like Panic Room and Benjamin Button.

Meanwhile, we relegate the top talent in fiction to college literature courses. And how many literary giants have died in poverty? A lot, I would think. Why is this? What difference between film and literature causes this disparity?

Your thoughts welcome.

* I love Europe**.
** And I even like European beer***.
*** I didn't actually drink any this time though.

Did anyone read Tintin comics growing up? I did. Got 'em at the library. I loved those things.

So it gives me great joy to report that the first film in a planned trilogy is in motion, courtesy of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson!

Via The Frodo Franchise -

Variety reports today that the main casting for the first of the three planned Tintin films is set. I hadn’t seen a title given up to this point, but it’s given there as The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn. I had already posted the information that Simon Pegg, Nick Frost (both of Shaun of the Dead fame), and Andy Serkis had been cast. Now it has been announced that Jamie Bell (who played Billie Elliot) will be Tintin and Daniel Craig will co-star as Red Rackham. (Craig previously worked with Spielberg on Munich.)

They aren't pulling any punches when it comes to casting, here. Sounds pretty cool.

Via Eric D. Snider: The Top Seven Worst MPAA Ratings of 2008. It's a good list with a lot of food for thought. Strangely, The Dark Knight does not make the cut. I have had extensive arguments with people who saw that film and were convinced it was rated R. It wasn't. Should have been, but wasn't. Still a good flick, though.

The really irksome thing about the inconsistent MPAA rating system is that it doesn't seem to come down to anything as banal as inconsistency on the part of the ratings board. No, it's hard not to notice that the big budget films with a lot of star power tend to pull somewhat gentler ratings than they deserve. Meanwhile, God forbid you use the f-word in an indie film, cause then its Cell Block R for you buddy!

Honestly I think we should scrap the whole system and go with the style used by TV shows, with different ratings for each axis of objectionable content.

Just for kicks, I just looked up Dark Knight on IMDB. It received it's rating for intense sequences of violence and some menace. "Some" menace? That movie was friggin' intense, wall-to-wall. The implied violence was pretty harsh too, and it was pervasive. And I like how they don't mention that one character sports an open face wound for a good portion of the film. Is that just 'menacing'?

What are your two cents?

Well, no. It's a fan made trailer for a theoretical live action flick based on everybody's favorite Blue Bomber. But you gotta admit, it already looks at least as good as Fantastic Four.

The day is young, but I feel confident in going ahead and handing 'Quote of the Day' to one James Lileks:

I’m not one to blame the victim, but I try not to travel with $120,000 in cash and jewelry. It’s easier than you might think.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point fans of the new Terminator series to this blog. A site called Critical Myth is doing some excellent deconstruction of everybody's favorite Battle for the Future.

Their review of Episode 2.2 highlights one of the things that I really love about the show - the writers know how to build an engaging plotline that ties into deeper issues. Seeing someone do that is something that really inspires me as a writer, and Sarah Conner Chronicles has pulled it off repeatedly since its inception.

Go genre TV writers!

I'm starting to adjust to the new Facebook. The reason being: it's all AJAX-ified. For those of you who aren't hardcore web-geeks, that means lots of stuff happens right on the screen without having to wait for one of those nasty page refreshes. Pop-up menus and hovering boxes abound. It's also nice to see comments on status updates right next to said updates. Very handy.

I've been very glad to see Facebook take off the way it has. MySpace was and is absolutely horrific in terms of design. It was ugly and clunky and felt like it was hosted on Geo Cities. I for one welcome our new web 2.0 overlords! I'd like to remind them that as a trusted blogger, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground data marts.

In other news, our Weekly Surprisingly Good German Film is The Lives of Others. It's a story of love, intrigue and secrecy set in 1984 behind the Berlin Wall. It's a vivid reminder of the oppression of a surveillance state, a meditation on art and artists and a portrait of moral complexity all rolled into one. Some objectionable content, but worth it in my humble opinion. Oh and sub-titled, obviously.

OK, that's it for me, there's a chicken tender sub in the fridge calling my name.

l8rs!

Via scanners -

The movie world lost Don LaFontaine today, the Voice of the Movies. But rather than mourn his passing, let's celebrate his life!

Below the jump, the man, the voice, the legend.

( Read more... )

From the Department of Missing the Point: Genius is matched only by bureaucratic incompetence.

Life with the Amish isn't all barn-raisings and hoe-downs. This Amish woman ran away from home at age 16 to escape their lifestyle. Naturally, she went on to become a pilot, international traveler and successful hand model.

encyclops makes a strong case for having the next Batman villain be Catwoman.

Finally, I know that New Zealand is proud of the Lord of the Rings films, but I still think their airport is kinda creepy.

OK, you have to understand that there's no way this movie can be good. The source material is simply unfilmable.

That said, the trailer looks incredible.

And I'm not just saying that because it features a remix alternate version of one of my favorite Smashing Pumpkins songs of all time.

Just an FYI, a heads-up if you will. I will be holding off seeing Teh Dark Knight until Sunday when I am viewing it on an IMAX screen. I can assure you that people posting spoilers on their LJs in the meantime will be prosecuted with extreme prejudice. Don't laugh, you will go directly to Internet Jail and you will not pass Go. So let's keep those reviews spoiler-free and those spoilers hidden under cuts. See, isn't this fun? I'm having fun.

In other news, when we got out of Hellboy II: Cruise Control last night at 10ish, there were a) a number of people already in line for Batman VI and b) a number of them were dressed as The Joker. Seriously, there were like 4-5 Jokers. What is wrong with you people?!?

Anyway, I wasn't impressed. The Joker is easy. I wanted to see if anyone had taken on Batman. Alas, except for a handful of girls in Bat-logo t-shirts, not so much.