Useless Inc. - Some movies

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Been a while since I posted about one of my biggest passions, being movies of course. Aside from spending an increasingly larger portion of my time on studies (who knew differential and integral calculus can be so demanding?) I'm still trying to find the time to work on some of my pet projects, particularly the home theater and car stereo systems I use. I did manage to see some movies and stuff though, so here we go:

Tim Burton's latest movie Corpse Bride is a mixed bag. Objectively speaking, aside from maybe being a little short (76 minutes) it is spectacular: visually beautiful, musically brilliant and featuring some of the best voice acting talent ever heard from behind the big screen. The problem is that it's not just a movie, it's a Tim Burton movie. It's no secret that I consider Tim Burton the best film director since... well ever, really, and I'm used to being so moved by his movies that I find it hard to breathe. Corpse Bride was great - the first half particularly so - but it gave me none of those "holy crap, I must've been holding my breath for 10 minutes straight" minutes that are the real highlights of the moviegoing experience.
I went to see Serenity with a bunch of friends today, but since some of them have already seen it the choice of movie inexplicably changed to The 40 Year Old Virgin. As far as shitty light comedies go this actually had some genuinely funny movies, but that's probably only because I wasn't expecting much. Bottom line: it's not much better than you'd expect, so stay away.
On the same note, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo is another "light" comedy. This movie is the embodiment of what I despise in Holywood (stupid, pointless and unbelievably coarse), so I won't bore you with the details. There are funny moments certainly, but the bottom line is it's a really crappy movie.
I finally got to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and was vaguely disappointed. My compadré Oren seems to have similar feelings about the movie; it was in many ways great (particularly the way they went all-out on effects), but it missed out on a lot of seemingly unimportant details that are absolutely vital to the entire Harry Potter experience. Read my comments on Oren's post for more insight (?).
Finally, my brother and some friends came over and we settled on watching Total Recall again. It's been at least 5 years since I've seen the movie and it's every bit as good today as it was years ago, with one important distinction: now that I'm older it's far more obvious to me how bad a couple of actors are (yes, Arnold, that means you. You're still the bomb though), and it's also far more astounding that despite the action-oriented mindset of the movie it is actually very well written. They manage to give you all of the clues and none of the answers, and they don't even hint at what the questions really are right until the very end (with that poorly chosen "What if it IS a dream?" line). Bottom line: terrific movie. God I miss the '80s.

Some movies I'm looking forward to:

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe might be the "next big thing" (after Lord of the Rings...) I read the prequel a while back and the first book a couple of weeks ago and wasn't actually overly impressed - so far it seems like a plainly overrated fairytale (I can certainly appreciate fairytales, just not the overly childish ones). In some aspects it keeps reminding me of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (which upon reflection was actually really very good), I guess I'll just wait and see.
I'm still waiting for Memoirs of a Geisha. As someone who's usually not into dramas I'm not quite sure what it is about the movie that attracts my interest, but I have a good feeling about it.

Saturday, December 17, 2005 4:06:11 AM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

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