Finally got to see Spiderman 2 today. No big surprises…I loved it just as much as everyone else did. I hope there’s an extended or director’s cut version, and I’d love to see a ‘making of’ featurette too.

Toby Maguire is such an unlikely candidate to play Spiderman, and he pulls it off so damned well. Its amazing how authentic he can look as a nerd AND as Spiderman. The special effects were freaking AMAZING. I think I snagged one effect in the entire movie that ‘jarred’ by not looking like it fit in perfectly. Kirsten Dunst is still pulling off the ‘incredibly hot yet very wholesome’ thing, and the actress who played Aunt May looks like she stepped out of the pages of the comic book.

Some really funny scenes, some great cameos, lots of incredible action, some real tear-jerker moments…the movie just hadseverything you could ask for. It gets my vote for Movie of the Year so far!

I watched Armitage: Dual Matrix the other day. It was pretty good if you’re an anime fan. It wasn’t good enough that I’d recomend it universally, as I would say Spirited Away or Grave of the Fireflies or even Princess Mononoke. But for anime fans, a decent movie.

Fairly typical plot. You have your earthers and your martians. The earthers hate robots and want to suppress robot rights, the martians like robots and need them to help the colony survive. Some evil dude sets up a massacre so that it looks like the robots killed a bunch of people. Armitage is a robot, a “type 3” and she has to fight the conspiracy while avoiding capture. Someone wants to take her apart to see what makes her tick since she’s done something no robot has ever done.

Lots of action, a decent if predictable plot. Good voice work on the English Dub. All in all, as I said, a decent movie for anime buffs.

Carm and I watched Amadeus the other night. I’ve seen it before, way back when it came out. But it was like seeing it for the first time watching it with Carmina. Her knowledge of Mozart’s music, and specifically his operas, made a lot of things more clear to me. For instance near the end of the movie there’s a wild opera going on and she pointed out to me that it was a parody of all of his operas…a kind of tribute to him. He appreciated it, but his wife didn’t. I never picked up that it was a parody so that was all lost on me.

One of the things I really appreciated was how they used modern speech in the movie. It made it very accessible, without really being too jarring. It was almost like a translation. You know the characters wouldn’t have used that particular phrase, but they would’ve said something with a similar meaning.

The costumes and of course the soundtrack were amazing. It took me a long while to place Elizabeth Berridge, who played Constanze Mozart; she played the ugly, awkward lady cop on The John Larroquette Show! She was gorgeous in Amadeus!

One other important fact I took away from watching the movie with Carm is that it isn’t true. Certain facts were true; Mozart was terrible with money, he was married to Constanze and they were very much in love, and Salieri was the Court Composer at the time. But there’s no historical evidence of any of the scheming or the malice that Salieri had for Mozart in the film.

It was a great movie in 1984, and its a great movie today. If you haven’t seen it, you should. It really benefits from a home theater system, though. The soundtrack is so….massive.

So I watched Lilo & Stitch today, and I actually found it somewhat refreshing, for a Disney animated movie. Lilo was a screwed up little kid, and today there are so many screwed up little kids in the world that it was nice, for once, to not see the perfect child as a star. And even her sister…her tummy had a bit of extra weight on it and she really shouldn’t have been wearing navel-baring shirts. So in a way the movie rang very true to me.

Stitch had some neat animations, but as is so often the case, the CGI animation and the hand drawn animation really didn’t blend well. The basic story has been done to death but there were enough fun twists and angles to it that it made it quite enjoyable. Some of the voices seemed wrong…Lilo’s sister sounded more Hispanic than Hawaiian to my ears, but then I’ve never been to Hawaii.

All in all though, a fun film. Nothing amazing…just a decent rental for a rainy day.

Last night we watched Balzac: A Life of Passion starring Gerard Depardieu as 19th Century author Honore de Balzac. Turned out this wasn’t a movie but a 2-part mini-series which, I assume, originally broadcast on French television. As such it was about 3 hours long. Now for someone as flighty as me, 3 hours of sub-titles can be quite a challenge, but I found myself completely captivated.

The film is aptly titled in that it was more or less a straight-forward biography. Balzac was a driven writer but in many ways his life was rather uneventful. He wrote, he loved, he died. He was a schemer whose schemes invariably fell apart, and we see this aspect of him, portrayed in a bittersweetly amusing way.

But my point is, if you’re looking for action and adventure, this isn’t the place to find it. But from the point of view of trying to understand who this man was, and what the times were like when he lived, its wonderful. I was particularly struck by the age of many of the characters. At the start, Balzac has a mistress much older than he is. And by then end both he and the woman he loves have aged quite a bit. Obviously the film was based on real events so they couldn’t very well make Balzac and Eve 20-year-old lovers, but still it was refreshing to see a story in which people over the age of 30 still fall in love and desire one another.

One of Balzac’s life-long friends was Victor Hugo (played here by Gert Voss) and I was intrigued by him as well. Also we get the briefest sketches of Eve Hanska and I’d love to learn more about her. We get these intriguing glimpses of a curious blend of devout religious beliefs and an almost pagan superstitionism. I want to know more!

The sets and costumes were wonderful. The sets weren’t really lavish, but rather than show huge swathes of Europe in the early-mid 1800’s they focused on a limited number of locales but did them very well. But the clothes did seem lavish and, to my layman’s eyes, quite authentic.

I must be honest and admit that I’d never heard of Honore de Balzac before seeing the film. Now I’m quite interested in him, and intend to pick up a biography written not too long ago, as well as a few of his books. I’m finding these films about authors (saw Henry and June not too long ago) to be quite inspiring.

A Short Biography of Balzac

Carmina and I saw Cyrano de Bergerac (a few posts down) together, and afterwards we talked about it a bit, and then later she sent me this email. Seemed worth sharing with the world. 🙂

—–
I was thinking about Cyrano de Bergerac tonight, and about Roxane, and
about how I called her a ditz during the movie. The book I was reading
today, Embroiderer’s Story, traced the history of the British
embroidery tradition from the time of Elizabeth I through the 20th
century, and related the relationship of the craft to the state of
women’s lives in all those periods. (There -IS- a point to this, I
swear. It’s just going to take me a bit of work to explain to you how
it’s all related!)
Continue reading “Guest Post on Cyrano”

Tonight’s movie selection was 1990’s version of Cyrano de Bergerac starring G�rard Depardieu as Cyrano, the delicious Anne Brochet as Roxane, and Vincent Perez as Christian.

What a great production. Now I’ve got to confess that I never read the original play by Edmond Rostand so I didn’t know the whole story. I knew about Cyrano speaking for Christian to Roxane, whom he loved, and that he had a big nose and all that rot. So the first half of the film was reasonably familiar ground. But the second half (after they go off to war) was all new to me and a wonderful tale.

Well worth watching, if you haven’t seen it.

Spent a lazy afternoon today watching Bubba Ho-Tep, the Bruce Campbell flic that just hit DVD.

Very silly movie. Campbell plays Elvis Presley, who is alive and semi-well and living in a nursing home. Ossie Davis plays a fellow who thinks he’s JFK. (Elvis: “Jack, you know Kennedy was a white man, right?” Jack: “That’s shows the genius of their plan! They dyed me!!”) Well it turns out an ancient egyptian pharoh has come back from the dead and is feeding on the souls of the old folks at the home, so the two old boys decide to put a stop to it.

Cheesy effects, a silly premise…its a just-plain-weird movie. Sadly it wasn’t great. It was really slow to get going, and a lot of Elvis’s problems give the film an R rating that could’ve easily been PG with a few minor script changes (I thought).

Still a kindof fun mindless Saturday matinee kind of flick.

I think this is the last in my ‘finale’ posts. 🙂

[SPOILERS for ST: Enterprise season finale follow!!]
Continue reading “Star Trek: Enterprise Season Finale”