Ray Harryhausen’s cyclops + a carnival of crazy accents (why do some of the people from Baghdad sound like Topol while others sound like Tom Brokaw?) makes for a fun movie to mostly-watch on a snowy morning. I think I dozed off during one of the scenes where all the sailors where running from somewhere to somewhere.
It’s odd, because so much care went into the effects in groundbreaking films like this (Dynamation!) but the acting is so freaking awful. What’s the deal?
For a Voyager episode this isn’t too bad. Janeway has to strip down to a tank top and get all badass because her ship is overrun by giant virus particles AND because it is a total schvitz hole.
Seems like the Doctor accidentally brought a virus back up from a colony that grows into little flies that shoot out of your neck and then become these gross floaty things.
A fun pre-title sequence includes Neelix and the “Tak-Tak” – a race that makes idiotic facial and hand movements as it communicated. Very amusing.
I’ve been a Paul W.S. Anderson apologist in the past, but even I can not defend this movie. It is just retarded. All the explosions, sexy dames and cool guys walking slowly to killer industrial tracks can’t help you if your script is this bad.
I’m ready to say that Doomsday is the most underrated film of the year.
It features car explosions, women in tight outfits, the music of the Fine Young Cannibals, actual cannibalism, exploding bunny rabbits, removable eyeball cameras and more shots-to-the-head than The Departed. Plus Dr. Bashir plays the Prime Minister of England. How awesome is that?
The ending is retarded, but that’s as to be expected. Rhona Mitra is pretty kick-ass. Expect some direct-to-video sequels on this one.
Okay, I’ll be the asshole that bursts everyone’s bubble. This movie is a piece of shit. The script has the subtlety of an anvil falling on Wile E. Coyote’s head. It’s fun to watch, but so is Plan 9 From Outer Space. I place this very much on the same shelf as Kevin Costner’s The Postman.
Good.
I chuckled a bit and I like seeing J. Jonah Jameson play a top CIA guy, but even an unrepentant Coens fanatic can’t say this is anything to write home about. I’ll stand up for Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, but this one is kinda lame. I like, though, that the Fugs play over the closing credits.
I’ve been thinking about this movie nonstop since I saw it and I am ready to declare it some kind of masterpiece. It is unlike anything you’ve seen before – and that is to its credit and its detriment. It absolutely shuns all the preconceived notions of what an epic should be and what a biopic should be. It is a film of paradoxes. It is microscopic, in that it is solely about two guerilla operations in Che Guevra’s life with virtually no side stories, but it is also maximalist. This sucker is four-and-a-half hours long, so get ready to spend a LOT of time with bearded men getting shot in the mud.
Anything I can say about Che has already been said far more articulately by Jurgen Fauth in his review.
No Insignia
Awful. An abomination. A civil war in the continuum and Voyager has to save the day. They can’t go back to the Alpha Quadrant, but they can stop immortals from killing one another. Awful, awful, awful.
But I must be crazy, ’cause the nerds here love it.
A brutal, wonderful film that is to the indie-loser-palooka genre as, so I would imagine, the script of a WWE Smackdown scenario.
What is so remarkable is the lean nature of the script. We have just the right amount of comedy, blood, tears, sex and anxiety. The first act has you chuckling at these people, and by the third act you’d take a bullet for them. This movie has more in common with, say, Marty or, heck, even Barfly than the usual sports flick. It also makes me really respect the hell out of pro wrestlers. Metal Health will drive you mad indeed.
I love spaceships, from the rugged and clunky ones of the Alien franchise, to the floating electronics showroom that is the Enterprise-D. But what, really, can compare to the silver saucer of the 1951 classic The Day The Earth Stood Still? Nothing, really, so hats off to Scott Derrickson and team for creating a whole new paradigm in movie spaceships: the swirly, cloudy marble. These mighty spheres are breathtaking, especially when they’re headed right for us and there’s nothing the military can do to stop it! I cannot deny my heart was pounding like a delighted child’s during the first, oh, thirty-five minutes of this new TDTESS. Once the same-ol-story mechanics clicked in, well, it was kinda downhill. But as far a popcorn-munching delights are concerned, there are a decent-sized buttery handful to be had during this film.
Full review at UGO.com
Alfred Hitchcock has made dozens of movies you haven’t seen. And not only silent ones.
One of the films that’ve slipped through the cracks is this pretty uneventful crime story. The pluses include Charles Laughton’s mincing performance and ridiculous costumes. Also, the freezing winds of the rocky shores of Cornwall. The plot twists (based on a Daphne Du Maurier novel) are all predictable from many knots away. A product of its time, I suppose, but not really anything you need to put at the top of your list. I saw a pretty shitty print, though, so maybe I am being harsh.
I don’t know this for a fact, but I have a hunch that Don DeLillo is and forever will be tickled that this novel will be known to a wider audience as the thing that inspired the rock band The Airborne Toxic Event.
If the dude never wrote Underworld this would have made a fine magnum opus – an epic howl at fucked up values and a culture trapped self-referential abstraction. I can’t say that these 325 pages have any real plot, nor can I say that the characters seem real or even approachable…yet the book is very readable and both funny and tragic. Magically, it is firmly a product of the mid-1980s, but isn’t dated in its themes. If it were written today, there’d be stuff in there about the Internet and cell phones. But that’d be the only difference.
DeLillo is certainly clever and if you blanche at clever writing you probably won’t like this too much. I must admit I found this a little off-putting for quite some time until I got into the rhythm of things. I recommend buying this for $3 like I did at some junk shop in New Jersey.
November of 1996. This was, and probably always shall be, the high water mark of Star Trek. You had DS9 at the absolute apex of its game – as good as if not better than any of the other shows would ever be. You had the TNG films coming out every two years and, if we took this to be a queue, they had the potential to be awesome. And you had Voyager, which, yes, kinda sucked, but was at least there as an additional weekly fix. What a time! What a time!!
Of course, nothing this good lasts. The next feature film would be flat and the one after that would be awful. DS9 would retire in two years and Voyager would continue floating around the Delta Quadrant (but at least Seven of Nine was coming to round out the scenery.)
First Contact represents a future that could be – just like Zephram Cochrane’s warp ship ushered in an era of peace.
Now that I’m in the middle of “the project” I can see what a joy it was to hang out with Picard again. Nothing against Sisko or even Janeway…but it is just great to be back on the Enterprise.
Here’s what I said in June of 2006:
An absolute marvel of a motion picture. It has everything: it’s a time travel mindfuck, it’s a zombie picture, action-adventure, comedy and a great Star Trek yarn. Like Star Trek IV, one can come to this movie knowing nothing about Trek and still love this film. Alas, it is the only Picard film that really works (to my recollection), so here is an opportunity to bring up a topic that, you’d think, I’d only talk about ironically. Who is the better Captain, Picard or Kirk? Now, obviously Kirk kicks more ass. And, obviously, Shatner is King. Let’s get that out of the way. But I do think that Picard has better management skills. And I think he may be smarter. And, when push comes to shove, he can kick ass and make out with alien hotties, too. This conversation embarrasses all of us, yes I know, but I think the kneejerk reaction to yell at anyone who dare think Picard is better than Kirk ought to be reassessed. (Picard has the better catch phrase with “Make it so” also.)
About six years ago the movie theater under Carnegie Hall was turned into a “second stage” and everybody who’s anybody on WNYC has played there. I’ve wanted to go to a bajillion of the shows there, but somehow never made it. But Ann & I caught the Kronos Quartet doing a lot of “new music” on Friday.
There was a world premiere of some craziness by the drummer from Wilco. That was pretty cool. And a lot of really short pieces, some of which were fantastic and others that were just okay. I like when they get into a groove – when it is just random sounds, I lose patience pretty quick. That was the story with the second half of the program, a performance of “Black Angels” buy George Crumb. This may be a seminal piece of contemporary classical music, but to me it is a collection of abstract sounds that, when you aren’t in a reclining position, is impossible to listen to. Even when there are glowing glasses that people are “playing.” (I just kept thinking of Broadway Danny Rose.)
Anyway, below is a more astute description of what I saw. All I can tell you is that a little bit goes a long way with some of this stuff, but overall it was more positive than negative.
The press release:
On Friday, December 5 at 7:30 p.m. in Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall presents Kronos Quartet and percussionist/composer Glenn Kotche, drummer for the rock band Wilco, in the New York premiere of Kotche’s Anomaly, part of a wildly diverse program that also features Kronos performing a new staging of George Crumb’s seminal 1970 work Black Angels and a number of world and New York premieres. Kotche’s Anomaly, his first piece written outside the percussion realm, is a 25-minute, 7-movement composition that treats the individual string quartet members like the limbs of a percussionist. Additional premieres on the program include Raz Mesinai’s Crossfader (world premiere), Ramallah Underground’s Tashweesh (NY premiere), Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of the traditional Greek folk song Smyrneiko Minore (world premiere), Judith Berkson and Garchik’s arrangement of the traditional Jewish song Ov Horachamim (world premiere), and Hanna Kulenty’s String Quartet No. 4, “A Cradle Song” (NY premiere). A pre-concert talk starts at 6:30 p.m. in Zankel Hall with Glenn Kotche in conversation with Jeremy Geffen, Carnegie Hall’s Director of Artistic Planning.
