Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Thursday, 8 August 2013
Wednesday, 7 August 2013
... as I idly scanned Buzzfeed headlines, but I see it's written by a "Buzzfeed fellow" named Spencer Althouse, and I'm always looking for new posts in the storied line collected under my "other Althouses" tag.
Here's Spencer's collection of "The 31 Most Sinfully Sexy Nuns In Movie History." As the countdown continues, you become more and more sure that #1 is Audrey Hepburn in "The Nun's Story," but she's not.
I'm 22, an identical twin, and I don't trust men who shave their armpits. Comedy writer, aspiring screenwriter, Academy Awards enthusiast.So... there are 2 other Althouses.
Here's Spencer's collection of "The 31 Most Sinfully Sexy Nuns In Movie History." As the countdown continues, you become more and more sure that #1 is Audrey Hepburn in "The Nun's Story," but she's not.
Saturday, 27 July 2013
After writing about larvae in my first 2 posts this morning, I go check out what's new at Instapundit, and the first post over there is about larvae — and not the same larvae. It's not as if some big larvae story hit the news overnight and everybody's got to talk about larvae.
If this were the first scene in a movie, this morning laughing about larvae would feel ominous, and within the next half hour, larvae would be threatening all of humanity.
If this were the first scene in a movie, this morning laughing about larvae would feel ominous, and within the next half hour, larvae would be threatening all of humanity.
Said Steven Gaydos, of Variety magazine. "They have to kick their dependency on $300m blockbusters. If they don't, they're going out of business." But it's not going to happen:
Looking at this from the distance — I am old, and I haven't gone to the movies in a year — I think: Good, I hope they fail. Why should I care if these studios collapse of their own rot? I try to summon up some empathy. In the last post, I was surprised by empathy for the soldier fly, bred inside a closed appliance for the purpose of food. (I refuse to consume non-free-range larvae.)
Who are the workers of Hollywood, that we should care? They seem quite awful. Maybe Hollywood should make more movies about the good people who work behind the scenes. A fantastic 4 of The Gaffer, The Grip, The Best Boy, and The Seamstress. We mainly see the snobbish bastards who — as movies have taught us — inspire our lust to gaze upon downfall.
"Look at Comic-Con and then tell me if you think Hollywood is going to cut back on its comic-book dependency.... Look at how that event was covered by the critical establishment.... By and large, people are not looking for intelligent, edgy, mid-range movies. They're looking for superheroes and special effects. They're looking for amusement rides. They're like the kids in Pinocchio who still want to go to Pleasure Island. They're voting to be donkeys."Coming up: Pirates of the Caribbean 5, Thor 2, Fantastic Four 3 and another Godzilla.
Looking at this from the distance — I am old, and I haven't gone to the movies in a year — I think: Good, I hope they fail. Why should I care if these studios collapse of their own rot? I try to summon up some empathy. In the last post, I was surprised by empathy for the soldier fly, bred inside a closed appliance for the purpose of food. (I refuse to consume non-free-range larvae.)
Who are the workers of Hollywood, that we should care? They seem quite awful. Maybe Hollywood should make more movies about the good people who work behind the scenes. A fantastic 4 of The Gaffer, The Grip, The Best Boy, and The Seamstress. We mainly see the snobbish bastards who — as movies have taught us — inspire our lust to gaze upon downfall.
Friday, 26 July 2013
Scott Ney explains the movie device of having the characters themselves take note of the plot hole you the audience member are going to notice so there can be dialogue bullshitting about why it actually should not be viewed as a plot hole. This device, once you start noticing it, is much more irritating than the plot holes you might have been able to ignore.
To paraphrase one of Page's questions: Who'd want to be stuck in a movie for 2 hours?
I first noticed this tactic being employed in... "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" [which goes into] underworld to rescue Jack Sparrow, following his death at the climax of "Dead Man's Chest." Since that film ended with Captain Barbossa's resurrection, courtesy of voodoo priestess Tia Dalma, two comic relief sidekicks can't help but inquire, as anyone in the audience who's even kept track of the plot might as well, why she didn't apply the same treatment to Captain Jack? Ah, she answers, but Barbossa was only dead in spirit, his body still earthbound, while Jack has gone to the other side body and soul....Via Metafilter, where somebody says:
God, this drives me nuts. The last Star Trek film was full of it. Like ten minutes in, when Scotty was freaking out about how being underwater would wreck the Enterprise, I leaned over to my husband and said, "Pointing out how stupid this is doesn't excuse how stupid this is."And here's every question Ellen Page asks in "Inception":
To paraphrase one of Page's questions: Who'd want to be stuck in a movie for 2 hours?
Tuesday, 23 July 2013
"Here’s our guide to some of the most notable (and gayest) old-school flicks from before the millennium."
These films may not be perfect. In fact, some are downright offensive by today’s standards. But they are all in some way groundbreaking for their time period and considered in sequence they provide a record of mainstream culture’s changing attitudes towards gay men.It's nice to be in a place where these movies can be seen from a distance and even enjoyed. I was living in Greenwich Village where they were filming movie "Cruising" (circa 1980) and remember the protests. By then, the pushback was already strong, and it was embarrassing for Al Pacino to be involved in the project. Now, this weird old artifact of unhappier times can be watched for fun, apparently. I guess it depends on who you are and where you are on the that's-not-funny spectrum of human psychology, which might be gender-linked.
Saturday, 20 July 2013
"... that wastes the film it’s printed on. Get to the point, you say. What is it about? Absolutely nothing, really."
Ryan Gosling, looking dangerously anaesthetized, is an American thug who runs a brutal boxing club that doubles as a drug den in the slums of Bangkok. When his sub-mental brother rapes and slaughters a teenage whore, her father slices his head off....I'll slice off the rest of the plot line and go right to:
What on earth is going on here? Was Drive a fluke, or is [Nicolas Winding] Refn just another no-talent from the Lars von Trier school of Something Rotten in Denmark flummery?Years ago, it used to seem necessary to take in these Danish movies. Life is so much easier now.
Thursday, 18 July 2013
Emails a reader — pointing to this post of our last outing with the dog Zeus — and revealing the non-embarrassing truth that I've never seen the movie "Die Hard with A Vengeance."
I've never even seen "Die Hard" (without a vengeance), but I have watched that clip, and I laughed a lot.
"Why you keep calling me Jesus? I look Puerto Rican to you?"
I've never even seen "Die Hard" (without a vengeance), but I have watched that clip, and I laughed a lot.
"Why you keep calling me Jesus? I look Puerto Rican to you?"
"'A lot of people have this syndrome,' she said while waiting in line on Saturday. 'That’s why we don’t sit in our apartments.'"
From an article about waiting in a long line to walk through an art installation that creates a sense of walking in the rain, where you also don't get wet.
Obviously Five Questions:
1. What if something happens back at your apartment while you are out? But you don't have that kind of apartment, do you, where things could happen, outside of the potential for break-ins and other disasters that you'd rather avoid?
2. Why stand waiting to walk, when you can walk somewhere else? Would the alternative of going for a walk seem better if it is raining or if it is not raining, considering that the installation combines walking and not walking in the rain?
3. What other ways can you walk in the rain and not walk in the rain and leave your apartment and not leave your apartment? You can watch a movie where there's walking in the rain. To replicate the experience of standing in line to walk through an installation of walking in the rain and not walking in the rain, watch the movie standing up.
4. Once you become aware of the fear of missing out, do you not immediate progress to the fear of the fear of missing out? From FOMO to FOMOphobia?
5. The "only in New York" meme is perhaps never used convincingly, but wouldn't it tend to be true that the people with the most intense FOMO would congregate in New York City, because it's got the reputation of being the place where if something were happening it would most likely be happening in there, a reputation that feeds itself (with FOMO folks)?
From an article about waiting in a long line to walk through an art installation that creates a sense of walking in the rain, where you also don't get wet.
Obviously Five Questions:
1. What if something happens back at your apartment while you are out? But you don't have that kind of apartment, do you, where things could happen, outside of the potential for break-ins and other disasters that you'd rather avoid?
2. Why stand waiting to walk, when you can walk somewhere else? Would the alternative of going for a walk seem better if it is raining or if it is not raining, considering that the installation combines walking and not walking in the rain?
3. What other ways can you walk in the rain and not walk in the rain and leave your apartment and not leave your apartment? You can watch a movie where there's walking in the rain. To replicate the experience of standing in line to walk through an installation of walking in the rain and not walking in the rain, watch the movie standing up.
4. Once you become aware of the fear of missing out, do you not immediate progress to the fear of the fear of missing out? From FOMO to FOMOphobia?
5. The "only in New York" meme is perhaps never used convincingly, but wouldn't it tend to be true that the people with the most intense FOMO would congregate in New York City, because it's got the reputation of being the place where if something were happening it would most likely be happening in there, a reputation that feeds itself (with FOMO folks)?
Monday, 15 July 2013
A clip from 2009, out of context, presented on the occasion of today's use of the "nuance" tag, one of my all-time favorite tags on this blog.
I think it's fun to take things out of context, and fun to put them back in. Another example is in yesterday's vlog, where I was answering questions from readers. I threw in the line "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." I saw over at Lem's place, where some of my former commenters have congregated, that at least one aggrieved commenter assumed I was mad as hell at the commenters. I'll show you the actual context in a few minutes.
The original context for that "Nuance!" clip above is here: "The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle."
What emptiness are your jaws clamped around?
"I was in that ultimate moment of terror that is the beginning of life. It is nothing. Simple, hideous nothing. The final truth of all things is that there is no final Truth. Truth is what's transitory. It's human life that is real."
That's a hint about the context for my "mad as hell" outburst.
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