Tag Archives: Movies

No Writing tonight

This morning my alarm went off and I had a headache. Anytime I have a headache before I have even opened my eyes is a bad time.

I stumbled into the bathroom and, knowing the pain that was too follow, switched on the lights. Yup, hot needles shoved through my eyes and into my brain.

Despite this I managed to make it to work, on time, and struggling through a tough day.

It’s late and my head still aches. I have done nothing this evening except watch an extended version of an SF film tonight with my sweetie.

Here’s a hint to what film we started tonight. (The extended version is nearly three hours long)

Get That Floating fat Man in here! The Baron!

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No Sunday Night Movie

I was simply too exhausted to even watched a TV episode last night much less a full feature film. I will return to the Sunday Night Movie next weekend with either The Mist or We Were Soliders.

Sunday was a pretty good day overall. I saw a good movie — Zombieland — nearly won at Scrabble with my sweetie-wife and had a pleasant time hanging out with my pal.

Working is coming along on world-building for Cawdor. I’ve making tons of notes for a new human culture and new human religion. This will be the basis for one faction of the novel, the TANS. A lot of what I am putting together will not appear directly in the novel but it will inform how characters act and react to each other. The fun part will be presenting each culture truthfully with pluses and minuses. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decided which side is just and right in its war.

I do think life is messy and novels and arts shouldn’t be too cut and dried with good and bad guys.

(That was the biggest weakness in Eric Flint’s 1632 novel.)

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Movie Review: Zombieland

Zombieland While Zombies are not my personal supernatural monster — ghosts fill that particular niche in my tastes — I do have a fondness for the zombie movie. I’ve watched zombies movies as far back as Bela Lugosi‘s White Zombie to today’s film, Zombieland.

(I went with a  friend and commented that this might have been the first Woody Harrelson film I had see. That turned out not to be true. A quick scan at IMDB showed I have seen two Woody Harrelson movies and one in the theater even. I watched EdTv on video and paid good money to see Natural Born Killers. EdTv was forgettable and Natural Born Killers I guess I repressed as I thought it was a god-awful film.)

Back to today’s movie.

Zombieland is that fairly new genre, the Zombie Comedy. The two best Zombie comedies before zombie land in my opinion would have to be Return Of The Living Dead, and Shaun Of The Dead. Zombieland is a fine and worthy addition with these films as good, funny, and tense zombie stories. There’s a lot of good humor in this movie and humor works best when it is unexpected, so my review is going to be as spoiler free as possible. This is a film to be enjoyed fresh and unspoiled.

The basic plot of Zombieland is the basic plot of zombie films since the Italian film Zombie 2 and George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead gave us the Zombie holocaust. A band of survivors must struggle to overcome internal strife and external threats to survive in a world overrun by zombies. It is a plot and form that when done well can speak to everything from consumerism to the basic need to trust each other. If done poorly it becomes nothing more than cheap effects and blood splatter. This movie was not done poorly.

The film is most unique in two dimensions. The first is visually. The director plays artfully with the frame and with titles to illustrate his film and his protagonist’s viewpoint. In this manner the film reminded me a bit of Stranger Than Fiction. (And that’s not a bad thing as that is a wonderful film.) The second is that the film truly understands and has fun with what my friends and I have referred to as Professional Victims. The protagonist has a series of rules for survival in Zombieland, the world filled with zombies, and his rules make sense and are the type too often ignored in less capable movies. They are also a wonderful source for the continuing humor in the piece.

You may have noticed I have not named characters. There is a reason for this. In this film the characters do not have traditional names. In an attempt to keep each other at arms length  emotionally they referred to each other as the destination cities for each person. So the protagonist is Columbus, Woody Harrelson is Tallahassee and so on. This surprisingly works without distancing the audience from the film.

It is a zombie movie so it is violent, but if you can deal with violence then I heartily recommend this movie to you. I know I will be getting it once it comes out on blu-ray and who knows I may even see it again in the theaters. I enjoyed it that much.

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Sunday Night Movie Aliens

ALIENSA day late because I’ve been working overtime at my day-job, but here is my Sunday Night Movies Feature.

This Sunday I watched Aliens (1986) I have the big boxed set with all four films in the Alien franchise, though I am really only a fan of two of the films. (Alien and Aliens) The Boxed set has two versions of each movie, the theatrical cut and a director’s cut.

The Director’s Cut of Aliens really does add a lot of character to the film and is my preferred version to watch. However due to time constraints I watched the original theatrical cut of the film on Sunday night. I had this strange desire to be in bed before midnight — silly me.

Aliens is the rare sequel that lives up as a worthy successor to the previous film. Alien is a masterpiece of a horror film directed with perfect style by Ridley Scott. (Can anyone explain to me what Ridley Scott is doing directing the film version of Monopoly? A movie based on a board game? A storyless board game. Never mind, that’s a rant for another day.) Aliens does not try to be a horror film, writer/Director James Cameron crafted Aliens to be an action movies so that he would not be simply re-making Scott’s film. This was the right call to make and a spot where many sequels go wrong. They fail to find a way to be their own film while honoring the first.

In this sequel, Cameron, focuses on Ripley, played pitch perfect by Sigourney Weaver, and her survivor’s guilt. Cameron takes a character that had no backstory – hell in the original screenplay Ripley had no gender – and crafted a backstory that propels the character in action over her paralyzing fear. (Most of the back story elements are presented in the Director’s cut which I recommend you view if you have not.)

Cameron plays perfectly with the form of the story in Alien as a template for his own movie, while creating interesting characters. The arc of the two films are very similar and this is no accident. The turncoat characters, big explosions, and explosive decompression are elements which have cause some to call Aliens derivative, but I think those people miss the point. It was similar because it was not a horror film. We already knew what the monster was and how it worked. The real key in a horrific story is the elements that do not follow our known rules and assumptions about the universe. Once something becomes known and understandable it loses a lot of power to horrify. Hence, Cameron’s call to make this an action film.

Truly I did not regret the two hours plus watching the film Sunday night and wished I could have spent the time to watch the longer version.

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A Good Day (Part 6)

No photographs this entry. We ended the tour with the Warner Brothers Museum. Sadly it was a no camera zone so I have no pictures of any of the items in the Museum. I did see many costumes and props and artifacts from the long history of WB films.

I saw the original prop for the film The Maltese Falcon. And I was shocked to learn that the prop Falcon weighs 43 whopping pounds. The tail feathers are bent from where it was dropped between takes.

There were also costumes from a number of recent films like Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street and The Watchmen. For The Watchmen costume all they had was Rorschach and the blue light suit worn to help create the character of Dr. Manhattan. (The rest of the main characters had their costumes on display in the guest center where the tour started.)

The second floor of the museum is dedicated to Harry Potter artifacts, including a sorting hat. An attendant holds the hat over your head and a random house is mentioned. Strangely for the second time this sort of thing has placed me in house Slytherin.

After this were returned to the Guest center and the tour was over.

If you love films and have the $200 to blow and a free day this tour is well worth it.

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A Good Day (Part 4)

In the afternoon we were taken to the vehicle room. Here they had on display ‘hero’ vehicles used in WB productions. By hero vehicles they mean the car and such that were used in normal shots, not in stunt photography. These vehicles were the actual ones. not reproductions.

Cars From AI Here is a car and a flying vehicle used in the movie A.I. I’m a genre fan but it is a film I have never seen.

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Burton BatmobleHere is the Batmobile used in the two Tim Burton Batman movies.

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Get SmartThe Sunbeam convertible used the feature film version of Get Smart.

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Nolan BatmobileHere is the Tumbler used in Christopher Nolan’s reboot of the Batman franchise, Batman Begins and again in The Dark Knight.

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BatpodAnd the Batpod also used in The Dark Knight after the Tumbler is destroyed.

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Gran TorinoHere is the Gran Torino from Clint Eastwood’s film, Gran Torino. Beyond you can the General Lee from the film version of The Dukes Of Hazzard, and beyond that a hint of the sedan from the Matrix films.

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Harry Potter Our tour guide in front of the flying car — it doesn’t really fly of course – from Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets.

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Mach 5.

The Mach 5 from Speed Racer.

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Hugo

Hugo Weaving was filming some Matrix related materials and showed up in the vehicle room. No, he didn’t – this is a Hugo Weaving dummy. They made a lot of these for the duplication scenes in the recent Matrix films, but it looked too good not to get a picture of it.  There were more of these in the museum, but I discuss that and the prop and costuming departments in my next post.

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A good day (Part 1)

I took more than two hundred pictures yesterday, but I will not be posting anywhere near that number. Still the number of pictures I am going to post from my day of fun will be sizable so the posts will be behind cutouts and it will be multiple posts.

For those interested in my day at Warner Brothers Studios and Medieval Times follow me past the jump….
Continue reading →

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