We just got back from watching King Kong in Cambridge. We got there 10 minutes late, so the theatre was packed and we scored ourselves some front row seats. Nothing like the prospect of watching a 3 hour movie as an extreme closeup. Luckily this didn’t prove to be much a deterrant because the movie was so entertaining. The time flew by, which is definitely saying something. Given the movie is a reinterpretation of an older film, it still felt fresh and vibrant on the screen. My familiarity with the Kong story pretty much extends to the numerous sendups seen on TV, such as the Simpsons and the like.

I loved Naomi Watts as Anne, the woman Kong falls in love with. She really came across as one of those classic, timeless beauties on-screen. Her interaction with Kong was awesome, showing a decent director and actors can work with CG characters without being wooden(I’m looking at you George Lucas). I had heard some people complain about the casting of Jack Black in the role of the movie director, but I found him to be half decent. I think he did a good job and played the character believably.

The CG effects were amazing as you would expect from a high budget film like this. Kong looked awesome, though I thought he looked a little tubby. There were lots of dinosaurs on Skull Island, so comparisons to Jurassic Park are inevitable. Luckily the movie offered plenty of variety in the way the dinosaurs were portrayed and styled. The brontosaurus stampede and dangling T-Rex scenes were truly unique and really made for some memorable cinema. The final aerial scenes are breathtaking, given I’m afraid of heights, that stuff kinda freaks me out at times.

After seeing this movie I’m inclined to say it’s the best movie I’ve seen this year, though I’ll reserve that until it’s had a little more time to sink in for me.

Anyhow, I was just checking out The Chris Ives Experience and thought his encounter with George "The Animal" Steele was quite amusing, and somewhat fitting to mention.

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Yesterday I had a chance to check out the new version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  I bought it for Corina as a birthday present, but given I don’t think I could have made it through over a month of not so subtle hints about how much she wanted to see it, I gave it to her early.  She really liked the original, so she had been quite intent on seeing it in theatres, only I was not so much at the time.  So I’ve been in the doghouse on that particular topic for quite awhile now.

I have to say I wasn’t too keen on this movie. I had heard beforehand that the movie was nothing like the original, and given I’ve only seen small parts of the original i didn’t have much frame of reference on this one.  I read the book when I was younger and the movie seems to fit the framework of what I remember.  Knowing that Tim Burton was directing it was probably going to be pretty dark.  Before even seeing a preview for the movie I heard Johnny Depp was cast as Willy Wonka and thought he would be a pretty poor Wonka, and I was proven correct.  The character of Willy Wonka is supposed to be whimsical, with a bit of an edge.  Depp didn’t pull it off.  He came off as a Michael Jackson-ish character.  A recluse, out of touch with reality, living alone in a factory of his fantastical creation and away from the prying eyes of the world that would take exception to his eccentric personality.  The movie was full of awkward, uneasy exchanges when Depp was on screen.  It made the movie somewhat unsettling.  About the only thing I liked about Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka was the big-ass sunglasses he sported a couple times in the movie.

I don’t quite understand what Tim Burton was going for with this movie.  It’s not a comedy really, with very few laughs thoughout.  It had lots of dark undertones to any laughs that were there.  The story features lots of underlying commentary about how parents raise children that was there in the book.  It had a good moral to the story about family values that was nice to see.

What I did like from this movie was the casting(aside from Depp).  All the children and parents were well suited to their roles and I liked  Helena Bonham Carter and the tech support guy from Vanilla Sky as Charlie’s parents.  It was surprising to see Christopher Lee as Willy’s father but  anytime you can have Count Darth Dooku Tyrannus Dracula in your movie, it’s a good thing.  The colour and cinematography in the movie was excellent and really set the mood of the film.

Overall it was an okay, but all it really succeeded in doing is to make me want to eat some Nerds, the best Wonka candy ever.

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You would figure Sylvester Stallone would get the clue that he’s old and no one wants to see his movies anymore, but you can’t convince him of that.  Stallone is trudging out 2 of his most popular film franchises for new sequels.  Rocky and Rambo will be making their return to the big screen, and I wonder why?  Stallone’s career has noticably waned in the last decade, but given the fact the guy is 59 you’d figure he would accept the fact that he can’t play these roles anymore.  Having watched all the Rocky movies you can say they all got subsequently worse, leading up to Rocky 5, the stinkiest of the whole series.  I’ve only seen First Blood(the original Rambo film) and can’t speak of the quality of the other 2 films. 

It seems really sad that Stallone’s career has reached the point he has to grasp at straws like this.  You can definitely draw parallels between his career and many boxers who stayed past the prime of their careers.  Hollywood has plenty of examples of actors who’s careers remain active as they advance in years(see Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Robert Redford etc.).  The difference between them and Stallone is they actually have the ability to act.  They choose their roles carefully and realize they aren’t the headliner anymore and step into supporting roles, letting younger actors take the lead while still turning in shing performances.  Stallone has never been a great actor, so avenues like this are closed to him.  Obviously his ego still feels he should be a marquee name in Hollywood, so he’s chosen to go back to what made him famous, almost 30 years ago.

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This morning I had a 6 week checkup on my knee. I think I officially decided my surgeon is a douchebag. I’ve tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but my mind is made now. I’ve been to his office a couple times and 2 of these times I have seen him walk out of his examination room and into the waiting room and said hello to him and received no reply. His total office has a small waiting room, small office with a desk, an examination room and a bathroom. The place can’t be more then 20×20 square feet in total. Yet twice I’ve been blown off in these small confines. It’s not like I was yelling across the room or anything, he was 4 feet away from me. My surgeon is tall, italian, has a goatee and has this brooding quality about him. He’s the type of guy you meet and you think there’s something not quite right. All that aside, he has me in for 3 minutes in the exam room, tells me he thinks I should be furthur along with my range of motion, then says he’ll see me in 3 months. I drove half an hour into Cambridge during morning rush for that. Gee, thanks.

Fantasy Update My fantasy team, the Modsuperstars™, made amends for their first week loss by demolishing the team fielded by gorilla vs. bear 91-36. The win vaulted them up to third place in the league. Boo-yah! Next week I take on Dodge’s winless squad and hope to build on my team’s upward momentum.

I think the Napoleon Dynomite phenomena is officially dead.

This post is all over the place, so I’ll just continue the trend. I’ve been listening to the new album Howl by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and am mightily impressed. The band have definitely changed their sound and it is definitely for the better. I wasn’t sure about the band after their last effort, Take Them On, On Your Own, was less then impressive. It’s the first album I’ve listened to in quite awhile that has stuck with me. I really like Complicated Situation, it has a nice Dylan vibe to it.

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This morning I took the initiative and setup my second computer in my office. It’s my old G3 tower and it’s express purpose was so I could watch DVDs while sitting at my desk. The odd thing is that I’ve hardly watched any movies at all. You’d figure most people who spend their days being a shut in would watch movies. Nope, not me. The movie genre has always bugged me a little. I’ve never been able to alot 2 hours of my life to watching a movie without good reason. If I’m watching a movie with someone, I can manage it. If I’m on my own it always feels like I could be doing something else. TV at least I can change the channel while watching, so it’s never really a passive experience. So hence the reason I went about setting up the office as such, so I could use the computer and watch a [[tt:DVD]] simultaneously. It’s pretty sad it took me almost 6 weeks to figure this ploy out. Now I have all of 4 full days before I have to head back to work. I could have been watching all the extended features of [[tt:Lord of the Rings]] that I’ve been meaning to tackle for 2 years now.

Anyhow, Corina and I rented a couple dvds last night. We watched [[tt:Sahara]], which wasn’t too bad. Today I watched the movie [[tt:Reality Bites]] for the first time. I came to the realization yesterday of how many good movies I have never seen before. Mainly because of this post over at My Blog Is Poop. Just from the list of movies mentioned on that post it’s rediculous. I’ve never seen [[tt:A Bronx Tale]], [[tt:Raging Bull]], [[tt:Anchorman]], [[tt:Airborne]], [[tt:Resevoir Dogs]], [[tt:Rounders]], [[tt:Swingers]], [[tt:Cider House Rules]], [[tt:Ocean's Eleven]], [[tt:Apocalypse Now]], [[tt:Platoon]], [[tt:Full Metal Jacket]], [[tt:Good Will Hunting]], [[tt:The Doors]] and that’s just a start. It’s practically an epidemic. I could spend years catching up on worthwhile movies that I’ve never seen. I even own a bunch of movies I’ve never seen, like Signs, The Hours, Gangs Of New York and Gangster No. 1. Oh well. It’s all new to me when I eventually do watch it.

I forgot with all the goings on and whatnot that I went to see Batman Begins on saturday night. We did the dinner and a movie with a whackload of friends. I always forget everytime I go to East Side Mario’s that I have no need to really order a large amount of food given all the bread and salad you can fill up on. Either way it was great and filling. We made our way to the late show. All the previews sucked. Makes me realize why I never go to the movies anymore. All they make is garbage.

Anyhow, I was quite pleased with Batman Begins. It was a little rough around the edges, but I think they hit the nail on the head. The Batman series suffered a horrible death after Batman & Robin, so this is a from scratch interpretation of the story, not as I’ve seen around a fair bit, Batman 5. I really enjoyed the character development that happened in the movie. Christopher Nolan definitely changed the direction of the movies by making it less an action movie then a thriller. Granted it did have some special effects and action, the action was used to make Batman more enigmatic and mysterious instead of being a conventional superhero with gimmicky catch phrases when dealing with villains. Batman has no superpowers aside from being trained in the martial arts and having access to lots of gadgets. So this was emphasized as Bruce Wayne was shown a few times after having the crap kicked out of him looking worse for wear. The movie had a fair amount of flaws, as outlined by Scott Kurtz of PVP, but it was still enjoyable. Not the best comic book movie, but worthwhile. Christian Bale made a pretty decent Batman. He definitely worked for me. Katie Holmes was wallpaper in the movie. The supporting cast of Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy and Liam Neeson definitely make the movie. Hopefully they can keep things rolling in the right direction with subsequent sequels.

This doesn’t really have any spoilers, but if you haven’t seen the movie yet, you may not want to read.  For those who don’t care one way or the other, I will continue. I have been a Star Wars fan for about 13 years, since I was 12.  I read alot the expanded universe stuff and used to be hardcore into Star Wars.  While I have dulled down my Star Wars fixation in recent years, I was still excited to see the new movie.  I read the book beforehand, as I did with Attack Of The Clones.  I rather enjoyed knowing what was going on before watching it.  Upon seeing Episode 3: The Revenge Of The Sith, I can say I couldn’t have disliked the movie more.  George Lucas is a fucking hack.  He had a perfectly good storyline structure and movie that could have been made from the material, but instead he opted to cram way too much into this movie, while leaving integral plots from the book on the cutting room floor.   The acting was marginally better then in the previous episodes, but it didn’t matter.  There was hardly any dialogue or anything memorable or quotable to be found.  Everything seemed compressed so the characters could spit out what they had to say so they could get on to the next plot point.  The movie was all cuts and fades all over the place.  I can hardly recall a scene in the movie that actually flowed from one shot to the next aside from the starting sequence.  Everything was jumping from one plot and conflict to the next.  The movie had a rediculous amount of action, which is what the fans want.  But when you have a lightsaber battle/duel every 5 minutes it loses it’s dramatic effect.  There are, by my count, 5 different major lightsaber vs. lightsaber conflicts.  Now the original trilogy had 3 lightsaber battles total.  The first 2 movies each had one, though on a larger scale then the original trilogies.  So this movie had the same amount as the rest of the
series, and that doesn’t include all the general use of lightsabers throughout the movie.  With that added it comes across as too much.  It really killed the impact of the final battle that everyone has waited for since seeing A New Hope, Kenobi/Skywalker I.

The visuals were alot of the time just thrown in gratuitously to satisfy fan cravings.  There is a whole battle on Kashyyyk, home planet of the wookiees, that while cool, seemed to be tacked on for the sake of having a reason to have wookiees in the movie.  In these scenes you see Chewbacca, and it’s rather obvious it’s him as soon as you see the scene, regardless of whether Yoda mentions him by name or not, but he gets called by name just for those 4 people in the theatre who didn’t know it was him.  It’s this kind of heavy handed directing that really weighs this movie down.   There is absolutely no subtlety to any of the direction.  It’s all hit you over the head obvious, when there was no reason to be.

At other points things are just left up to guessing how they came about.  It made me question at some points how people could watch the movie without actually having read the book.  Some of the plot points made no sense, or just failed to be convincing in suspending your disbelief of the movie.  How Anakin turns of the dark side is tenuous at best.  This should have been the very core of the movie.  Everyone knew Anakin had the dark in him, but I don’t think they did enough to hammer this point home.  In the book it’s almost believable, but given the movie is full of so many fluff action sequences this got backburnered.  The whole Star Wars saga is the rise, fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker.  How is it possible Lucas thought it was more important to show battles on numerous different planets, yet couldn’t find the time to convincingly tell the core story he claimed his whole saga was about.  What the saga was really about was giving visual handjobs to all the fans of the films.  Lucas was more focused on how to jam more visuals and holy shit moments into the movies that he lost focus of the big picture, delivering a memorable story.

As a big Star Wars fan I was willing to cut Lucas some slack upon seeing the Phantom Menace.  It wasn’t the greatest movie, but it was watchable and I was willing to give him a mulligan on that one because he hadn’t actually directed a movie since A New Hope, 22 years previous.  Then Attack Of The Clones came out.  It was markedly better then Phantom Menace and definitely gave you the feeling that this was leading to something really good.  I didn’t even have my hopes up that much about this one, so it’s even more disappointing that the movie turned out so wrong.

I’m pretty jazzed about this weekend as I will be getting the new Star Wars DVD boxed set. I haven’t seen them yet, so I can’t really weigh in on whether the changes on the DVDs are worth all the outrage. I’m the atypical Star Wars fan. Glutton for punishment. I already own the Star Wars Trilogy on bootleg DVD, so it’s not like I need to buy these other then to see the features disk and to see what George Lucas has messed with this time. In my opinion the Jabba scene in A New Hope needed to be redone badly. They screwed it up on the Special Edition, so they needed to fix it so it looked right continuity-wise compared to Jabba in Episode One. And Greedo shooting first should have been taken out altogether. Han was a mercinary smuggler, so he would have been ruthless enough to kill Greedo in cold blood. The story arc of the whole trilogy involves his transformation from rogue to celebrated hero. The other changes I think make sense, though I still have to see them to pass judgement.

And recently the Definitely Maybe DVD came out. I am planning on picking this one up as it’s just going to fucking own. I think Oasis needs to do this for Morning Glory and Be Here Now as well when their 10th Anniversary rolls around. It seems to be a rather unique concept, releasing a remastered album on DVD with documentary, live takes on the album cuts and commentary on each track. Seems like such a good idea. Can’t wait to see it.