Recently in Movies Category

I finally broke down and checked out the "The Darjeeling Limited". After my trip to India I knew I had to see it. The movie was fantastically beautiful. Although it wasn't the India I visited and the story wasn't mine I recognized myself in the movie in quite a few places.

Fitna the movie is out on YouTube now. I watched it. As a movie it wasn't that great. it cherry picks some hateful speech and juxtaposes it with violent images. I'm not sure it deserves the press it is getting. I suppose the editing is ok and it's always nice to see ideas "hoisted by their own petard."

The reaction it is getting in certain parts of the world is the predictable condemnation, followed by governments wringing their hands wishing their citizens wouldn't get the thin-skinned folks hopped up again. I've seen this news cycle before, I'm sure I'll see it again.

Kudos to google/youtube for keeping the video up all weekend. I'm sure it's been up on the servers long enough for them to have received numerous threats.

Three years later you run into the same movie on an unexpected night and you wonder will it be the same — will you love it as much as the first time. The movie, “Lost in Translation” still works for me. I’m not sure I’ll feel the same way when I see Juno three years from now.

The Simpsons movie was well worth the price of admission. It takes a lot to make me laugh out loud at a movie and I actually guffawed several times.

Where were you last Thursday night?

If you weren't at the Riverview Theater to see the local screening of Raiders you missed out on something pretty cool.

A couple of years ago I read a few news items about a couple of kids who made a scene for scene version of Raiders of the Lost Ark . They were 12 when they started and they finished at age 19. [Read more at Harry's Reviews, Wired and MPR] I immediately wanted to see the movie, but figured it would never get released as it would be impossible to clear the rights given that it was a derived work from a major studio. Fast forward to last week when I get an IM from some guy who said it was playing at the Riverview Theater and did I want to check it out. You bet I did, it had been years since I had seen the original news story.

The file was $10 a head, $8 if you came in costume. One guy showed up with a quite convincing Jones get-up and cracked a whip over the audience to start the show. I decided against the costume myself.

When the movie started with it's crappy distorted color and some obviously very young kids walking through a forest I was a little worried it was going to be awful. It didn't take much time for the production values to fade away. I spent the rest of the movie completely blown away at how faithful these kids were to the original movie and how they had copied the entire movie in an obsessive way that reflected a kind of love of the original movie bordering on a sick compulsion. It was a thing of beauty.

I don't know how these kids survived the filming. The fire scenes were painful to watch as a parent wondering how the kids didn't manage to burn their house down.

The movie was fun. It didn't add a lot to the original classic other than the fact that when the Harrison Ford lines are said by a teenager you realize exactly how stupendously ridiculous they actually are.

They only show the film for charity events as a way to keep from butting heads with the studio lawyers. If you have a chance to see this film jump at it.

I finished Fargo finally. It was a very dark movie. Overall I liked it but I'm in no hurry to see it again and I'm not sure that it's a movie I would want on a mythical desert island.

Speaking of chippers, I rented one today from Home Depot. It was a complete disaster. Not only was chipping my pile of brush slow, the engine kept dying, and eventually the teeth of the thing got so meshed that I couldn't restart it. (Thankfully I didn't have to pay for the rental, since I only got about 1/20th of my project done before I gave up and returned the machine.)

Today's experience leads me to believe that the chipper scene in Fargo was not realistic.

There were two bright spots in an otherwise dismal day. One, early yesterday morning someone surprised me with a pineapple scone. Secondly, I went and saw the movie, "Little Miss Sunshine".

It was by far the best movie I've seen this year. A movie hasn't made me this happy since I saw "Garden State", "Lost in Translation" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" - my personal movie trifecta of the last few years.

It's a fantastic cast -- every actor seems to have a scene or two where their character totally steals the show and makes the movie.

If one was a total snob about indie movies, you could complain about how perfect and commercial the cinematography was or whether the characters are too indie-cliche or whether the VW bus bit was too cutesy, but quickly you'll lapsed into the kind of rhapsodic ranting that the comic book guy from the Simpson's excels at and all your friends will be rolling theirs eyes and waiting for you to be done talking about the movie that did it better, the one no one saw and no one cares about. Yes, I am talking about you, get over yourself.

I like Garrison Keillor and I like "A Prairie Home Companion". This movie left me feeling ...

Spoiler alert, stop reading now if you don't want me to spoil the movie for you.

The Norman Rockwell Code

The unfortunate truth of sports movies is that at some level they all seem to be derivative of the Bad News Bears. Bad News Bears or not I still enjoyed Glory Road. The movie tells the story of the 1966 Texas Western basketball team who won the NCAA championship. The story is about more than just a game, it is a story about race in America. You can read a bit more about the story behind the movie on the wikipedia entry on Don Haskins .

It's a pretty good movie, it is predictable, but it told a great story without glossing over all the details. I give it three and a half stars out of five.

I'm so glad to not live in the "good old days" America depicted in this movie.