I’m not sure what will end up being a more depressing DVD release — The Last Kiss, or the Raiders’ 2006 team video. Probably depends on the number of Imogen Heap songs.
Category: Movies
Dear God — Idiocracy was hilarious. It’s not a great movie, to be sure, but it’s a brilliant movie. It lags at times, and the narration is a crutch, but it’s the first movie in a long time that has been so ambitious in creating a world and actually making it believable. (Well, not believable, but you know what I mean.) It’s probably not playing near you, but if it is, please go see it — if only to send the message that no studio executive gets to fuck with Mike Judge.
Enchantment Under The Sea Dance Revisited
Wow, I wish this had been my idea. There are a couple places where things don’t line up very well, but Gale & Zemeckis seemed focused on preserving the space-time continuum.
Blanks on a Blank: a filmmaking challenge inspired by Snakes on a Plane. “When you sign up a team to participate in the challenge, our random generator will provide you with an animal and a vehicle. You’ve then got until August 3rd to completely finish a 2–5 minute original disaster movie that shows us all about how bad things can get when your BLANKS somehow make their way onto your BLANK.” I goddamned love Austin.
This poor man has been shot and will die late at night inside the Louvre; his wounds, although mortal, fortunately leave him time enough to conceal a safe deposit key, strip himself, cover his body with symbols written in his own blood, arrange his body in a pose and within a design by Da Vinci, and write out, also in blood, an encrypted message, a scrambled numerical sequence and a footnote to Sophie Neveu, the pretty French policewoman whom he raised after the death of her parents. Most people are content with a dying word or two; Jacques leaves us with a film treatment.
Meanwhile the albino monk, whose name is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone, flagellates himself, smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.
The buried message of the film, perhaps, is that our political system resembles “American Idol.” … The winner is not necessarily the deserving contestant from an objective point of view, but is the one with the best poll numbers. A candidate from either party will be defeated if he is not entertaining. His intelligence and matters of right or wrong don’t have much to do with it. In this scenario, satire plays the role in politics that Simon Cowell plays on TV.
Thank You for Smoking
I wish it had had more meat to it (a lot of the characters could’ve used more dimension), but Thank You For Smoking is an excellent commentary on spin, bullshit, and diffusion of responsibility. Aaron Eckhart is, as always, one part hilarious and one part creepy.