escape to insanity

I recently re-activated my Netflix account after suspending it for several months while I moved around and got re-situated in my current living quarters and settled into my job. The last time I had an active Netflix subscription, I kept running into the problem of not having enough movies picked out to keep my queue continually full. I'd add two or three movies at a time and then not be able to find anything more that I was interested in watching, so I'd be basically paying for time that I wasn't cycling through movies. So I let the account sit dormant for a few months while I slowly added movies to it. When I got up to 70+ movies, I figured that would be sufficient for keeping the movies flowing for a few months, during which time I could add more without running the risk of an empty queue.

That's the background. Today I got home from work and cracked open my mailbox, to discover much to my delight a new movie had arrived. I wasn't really all that surprised — I knew it was coming, thanks to Netflix's thoughtful provision of an RSS feed for my rental activity and a notification e-mail. This particular movie was none other than Silent Running. Here's the plot summary from Netflix:

In a ruined future, huge orbiting spaceships preserve the last remaining trees from pollution and overcrowding on Earth. Botanist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) receives an order to destroy the trees. He refuses, setting himself against his superiors and fellow crew members. Directed by special-effects titan Douglas Trumbull, Silent Running's innovative effects and powerful themes ensured its cult status.

Hmm, alright. Sounds doable for a sci-fi movie, and if you know anything about me you know I love sci-fi movies. Run-time, 90 minutes even. Standard length.

Within the first ten minutes, I'm dubious at best. The characters are extremely cliched and lack any sort of depth. Within the first fifteen minutes, I'm extremely skeptical that there's any redeemable qualities. The plot is beyond thin, and suspension of disbelief can only go so far. The idea is that Earth has somehow lost all of its forests, and the only surviving nature preserves are in the form of a handful of spaceships meandering around the solar system (all built by American Airlines, as indicated by the ever-present logo), each with a half-dozen or so domed enclosures.

The characters are wusses. One guy falls and cuts his hand, and acts as though he's about to die… he goes running to another character to get patched up as easily as a five-year-old who just skinned his knee will go running to mommy. Yet those same characters have no trouble with nuking the world's last forests for no apparent reason (except for our hero, Freeman Lowell — certainly not a symbolic name at all).

By the end of the first half hour, there's just the one character left to concentrate on, and he's the worst kind of stereotypical tree-hugger hippie you will ever meet. Ever. I understand that's sort of the plot, that he's trying to save the trees, but this guy is beyond special. He of course begins to go crazy, being all by himself with the exception of a couple of stumpy robotic drones strongly resembling upside-down mop buckets. It continues for another hour.

He's also apparently the universe's most incompetent botanist. For all his professed love of nature and trees and his beloved forests, all his effort was completely wasted. Of the half-dozen or so domed forest enclosures on his ship, he manages to take action in time to save one. Yep. The others he just sat in his garden and cried about, one after another. Then he gets angry, and you don't want to see him angry. Oh, and he starts to wonder why his trees are dying when he's on the dark side of Saturn… apparently the fact that plants need sunlight to survive slipped his mind.

…I can't go on. This movie was beyond awful. If you ever get the urge to see this movie, or are ever forced for some reason to see it, take a fork and stab yourself in the head. Twice to be safe. Trust me, it's preferable to the alternative of watching this. I wouldn't go so far as to say this is the worst movie ever made (I know I haven't seen enough movies to make that kind of judgment), but it's definitely in the running.

The silent running, that is. (sorry… after 90 minutes of that garbage I can barely think.)

Photo by ellievanhoutte. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

We're starting to get into the new year… about to the point where writing checks with the wrong year is starting to fade away. We've probably gotten to the point where we're admitting that our resolutions — if we made any — are probably not going to be taken seriously. (I was going to make a resolution not to make any resolutions, but then… well… the universe would have imploded. You can thank me later.)

I'm starting to realize just how badly my wallet is going to be drained this year. It's a good thing I have no comprehension of anything relating to budgets, because mine would be blown entirely on “entertainment.” 2008 is looking like it'll be a great year for movies. In no particular order, except by the month they're going to be released, I present to you the awesomeness of 2008 in movies.

January

• Cloverfield (aka 1-18-08) I've been waiting for this movie to come out (like the rest of the movie-going world) since the trailer first appeared before Transformers. Hopefully the whole movie isn't shot in that shaky hand-held camera style - I don't think I could last through two hours of that.

February

• Jumper. This is another movie I've been psyched about since seeing the preview for it. Hayden might be able to pull himself out of the Anakin role for this one. Samuel L. Jackson promises an interesting performance too…

• Vantage Point. Eight different views of the same assassination attempt. The extended trailer I saw (on the Resident Evil: Extinction DVD) made it out to be much more political than I was aware.

April

• The Forbidden Kingdom. Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and this plot outline from IMDb.

  A discovery made by a kung fu obsessed American teen sends him on an adventure to China, where he joins up with a band of martial arts warriors in order to free the imprisoned Monkey King.

  That's all the more I need for this to intrigue me.

May

• Iron Man. 'Nuff said.

• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. While I think ol' Harrison Ford is getting a bit on in years to have quite the same effect as the first three, this installation of Indy could be interesting.

June

• The Incredible Hulk. While I think Eric Bana was perfect for the Bruce Banner character, I'm a big fan of Ed Norton (”People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden.”) so I'm hoping he can do the role some justice. I can't think of a single Ed Norton movie I haven't liked, so I've got high hopes for this one.

• Wanted. The plot synopsis, courtesy of Wikipedia:

  Wesley Gibson is offered the opportunity to seek revenge in the murder of his father, who was an assassin. Gibson is invited by his father's partner, Sloan, to follow in his father's footsteps. Sloan's second-in-command mentors Gibson. Wesley Gibson follows the death orders issued by the Fates, weavers who read individuals' destinies in fabrics produced by mystical looms.

  Umm… sure. Suspension of disbelief, here I come!

July

• The Dark Knight !!!! That's all I can say about this one.

August

• Blindness. Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore in a movie where even the Oracle, Wikipedia, doesn't have much to say about it. I'm intrigued - the story is apparently something about a city where the sudden loss of sight for the entire population brings on the collapse of their culture. Interesting, no?

• The International. Clive Owen is an Interpol agent investigating a corporation for corruption and murder. Alrighty, you've got my interest. I'll bite.

November

• Bond 22. Again, enough said. Though, “Bond 22″ is only the working title for now. Apparently this picks up exactly two minutes after the end of Casino Royale, which was an amazing movie, and continues the character development of early Bond.

December

• The Day the Earth Stood Still. Even though this remake is going to be starring Keanu Reeves (whoa!) I have decent hopes for this one. Jennifer Connelly might be able to rescue the film from Keanu's dubious acting.

And those are just the ones I'm aware of. There's bound to be a few others being released that I just haven't heard of but are still nothing short of awesome. I'm expecting to be throwing down quite a bit of cash money this year - the MPAA better not complain about theatre revenue this year. I'll be keeping them afloat singlehandedly, methinks.

Did I miss any good ones coming out?

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

As I mentioned in my last post, I went to see Spider-Man 3 on its opening night at midnight. I came out of the theatre wowed by the spectacle I had just beheld. I'm a fan of comic-book movies, even though I never had the pleasure of reading the comic books themselves. My collection of such movies includes films like Hulk, Batman Begins, the X-Men trilogy, and Daredevil and Elektra among others. I tend to prefer Marvel over DC, but whatever… that's not all that important really.

Recently it seems the most recent installment of the Spidey series hasn't gone over too well with the critics. Here's a sampling of the “blurbs you'll never see on the SM3 DVD”:

Bloated and stupid, this movie is so bad you can't even review it.

…so dopey and forgettable and crafted out of second-rate cheese.

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 makes just about every wrong move in the sequel playbook…

Hmm. That's not good at all. Seems the critics just didn't enjoy it as much as I did.

But you know what? Screw them.

When I go to the movies, my goal is to be entertained. That's it. That's my only expectation. Entertainment. Whether it involves spending nine dollars on a ticket stub and trying to avoid the snack counter like the plague, or pulling a DVD case off its shelf and popping in a disc from my own collection, movies exist solely for entertainment. I don't go into movies with some expectation of high-class work. I don't have a list of things the movie needs to do to be good. I expect them to have a plot that works semi-plausibly within my suspension of disbelief. That's about all there is to it for me.

So what I don't get is what the critics' problem is. I mean, I understand it's their job to watch hundreds of movies and comment on how well they were put together. But really… I think they've lost perspective. They get to watch hundreds of movies, and get paid for it. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me, ignoring the obvious fact that they have to watch lots of bad movies too.

If I come out of a movie entertained, then I count that movie as good. It may be better or worse than some other movies I've seen, but as long as I've been entertained, I'm happy with it. Sure, some movies have bad plots. Some have bad acting. Unfortunately, some have both. For some movies, the combination of thin plot, bad writing, and less-than-phenomenal acting spells death for the movie. We see this all the time — movies that never make it onto the big screen and end up on the discount racks at your local Blockbuster.

But you know what? If a movie manages to have a semi-decent plot, decent writing, and decent actors to deliver those lines, I'm satisfied. That's all I need — entertainment.

So what's wrong with critics? Did they just lose their sense of fun?

I decided to watch Kingdom of Heaven today, mostly for the simple reason that it features none other than the beautiful Eva Green. You may recognize her as the most recent Bond girl, cast as Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. In any case, I decided to watch 'Kingdom of Heaven' because I've not seen it in its entirety and because Ms. Green graces the screen with her presence.

It's a fairly long movie. The director's cut is over three hours long, putting it in the runnings with movies like any one of the 'Lord of the Rings' installments. Right in the middle of the movie, at an hour and a half into it, it fades to black and displays the word 'Intermission' in the middle of the screen.
Now… this confuses me. I started this movie knowing full well how long it was. I knew I was in for a long movie; I was fully aware of the amount of time I was committing to. So here I sit, in the comfort of my own home, watching a movie at my own leisure. This isn't a public performance, it's not being put on as a show on Broadway, there are no others in attendance for this viewing. Just me and my glass of orange juice. And animal crackers. Never mind them, they don't talk much.

In any case, I'm free to come and go as I please. I can start, stop, or even — gasp — rewind this movie as I see fit. It's as though I'm a minor deity, with ultimate power over this, my digital entertainment du jour. My media player bows in accordance with my wishes, playing on my command. So why does it feel the need to tell me it's time for an intermission?

Why can't I choose to have an intermission, say, at the one-hour mark instead of the one-and-a-half hour mark? What about the 23-minute mark? Or the two-hour mark? I'm just confused as to why there would be an intermission on a DVD — is that not what the remote control is for? I'm pretty certain there's a pause button here… lemme check… yep. There it is, an intermission button right there on the remote.

I don't get it. Maybe it's just me.

Eva Green picture from PopStarsPlus.com.

Erik and I were having a discussion about this tonight, and I thought it could make for an interesting post here. We were talking about movies we'd seen recently, and as conversations with Erik often do, the topic at hand quickly turned to the actresses in the movies.

We started talking about our favorite actresses, and by extension our celebrity crushes if we had any. I figured it'd be fairly easy to come up with a list of my top celebrity crushes. It was a topic that was brought up fairly frequently last year amongst the four of us roommates. So, I put some thought into it briefly, and here's my top five celebrity crushes, in no particular order:

• Piper Perabo. Okay, she's a little older than I (by eight years), but she's still gorgeous. You may know her from such movies as 'The Cave,' 'Cheaper by the Dozen,' and most notably the main character in 'Coyote Ugly.'
• Keira Knightley. She's been in quite a few movies. She's been Guinevere in 'King Arthur,' a handmaiden for Queen Amidala in 'Star Wars Episode I,' and you might know her best for her role as Elizabeth in 'Pirates of the Caribbean' opposite Johnny Depp.
• Speaking of Queen Amidala, next up is Natalie Portman. She's been in a few of my favorite movies — Evey in 'V for Vendetta,' Sam in 'Garden State'… and of course she got her start in 'Leon the Professional.' She's the all-around good girl, plus she's brilliant — and puts her education ahead of her career. Big thumbs up for that.
• Zooey Deschanel. My roommate and I apparently share this one. Trillian in 'Hitchhiker's Guide,' Reese in 'Winter Passing,' and Will Ferrell's romantic attraction in 'Elf.' She's one of those people where you're not really sure what it is about her that you like, but you know you like them anyway.
• The fifth entry becomes a toss-up, and the ones I decided not to include get honorable mentions. I decided the honor of my fifth slot goes to Rachel McAdams, which should appease Erik. She's probably best known for her roles in 'The Notebook' (sappy chick-flick, avoid at all costs if you have any testosterone in your body) and 'Wedding Crashers.' She's just… adorable.

Honorable mentions go to Mandy Moore and Jennifer Garner. Moore didn't make it because… well… I can't think of any good reason really. Because I said it'd be a top five, not a top six. She's beautiful, she's a good girl (the kind you can bring home to the parents), and she's multi-talented. Garner didn't make it because she's a few years older than the rest and married to Ben can't-act-his-way-out-of-a-paper-bag Affleck).

Okay… your turn. Any celebrity crushes? Not “oh man s/he is HOTT!” celebrities; this would be a list of celebrities who you'd love to date if they weren't celebrities. Andrea… that means no Johnny Depp for you.

Today I picked up GoldenEye at my local WalMart. It was on the cheap (cheap as compared to most DVDs at WalMart) DVD rack, so how could I refuse? The great Bond movie that spawned one of my favorite video games of all time had to be mine.

Right there next to GoldenEye were four other Bond movies, all priced the same as the one in my hand. The only thing keeping me from getting them right there on the spot was the reminder at the back of my mind that I could get all of the Bond movies in boxed sets now, and if I did decide to pick those up, I'd be stuck with the single copies of each of these and have to sell them off. Not that it's a hard thing to do, but then I'd have dropped an extra $40 plus tax on these extra movies. (I'd probably still keep GoldenEye on its own, just because.)

I'd actually been looking at the four boxed sets — sorry, “volumes” — a few days ago at Best Buy. They're ridiculously expensive — around $70 each — although I suppose each box does have five movies plus some bonus material. If you assume each movie would be at least $15 if not more, then I guess they're actually pricing them fairly accurately. In any case, I don't usually like to drop several hundred dollars on a whim, so I left Best Buy empty-handed that day.

What I don't understand is the way the movies are sorted. Each “volume” has five movies, but they're not arranged in any sort of understandable fashion. I would have expected them to be grouped by release date — the first five movies in Volume One, the next five in Volume Two, and so on. Instead, it seems to be completely random. I'd hate to have to read each box every time I wanted to watch one of the movies.

“Hmm, I'd like to watch 'Diamonds are Forever.' That was the seventh movie in the series, so that must be in the second box. Oh wait, that's right, it's not arranged in some logical order, it's actually in the first box.

Well, you know, actually I think I'll watch 'Die Another Day.' That was one of the most recent ones with Pierce Brosnan, so that's gotta be in the last box. D'oh! No, that's right, it's in the second box!”

Ridiculous. What was the logic behind the order of the movies? Every boxed set I've ever seen has had the movies arranged in order of release. Granted, there's usually not twenty-plus movies, but still. The principle is the same. I see no discernible pattern to the order of the movies. I thought maybe it was by actor, but no. Maybe it's some sort of theme to the movies themselves, but again no.

Gah. It doesn't really matter, but it's terribly inconvenient. The extra few seconds I'd spend looking for the movie I want could be spent… um… getting chips. Cause those extra ten seconds are ten seconds I'll never get back. I'd like to think there's going to be a boxed set released with an order that makes sense, but I know I'm just being idealistic. Eventually I'll pick these up, but right now the price tag is still a bit too high for me.

Edit: Sami has a suggestion as to the reasoning behind this idiocy:

Sami: probably pairing the ones that bombed up with the ones that did well just for marketing

Which… oddly… is probably the case. I mean, why else would they pair a fantastic movie like A View to a Kill (featuring none other than Christopher Walken as the villain) with a movie like Die Another Day?

It looks like 2007 is going to be a fantastic year for movies. Just a few of the ones I'm looking forward to this year:

• Resident Evil: Extinction
• Transformers
• Spider-Man 3
• Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
• The Bourne Ultimatum
• The Number 23
• Ocean's Thirteen
• Zodiac
• 300 (IMDb claims this was released in 2006, but they lie — it was released today)
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie
• Alien vs Predator 2

Sure, a good chunk of those are sequels, but you have to admit they're sequels to great movies. Hopefully they stack up to the originals. Some notable entries, which I'll likely have to pick up opening-night tickets for:

Resident Evil: Extinction

From the trailer, it looks like they're taking the franchise in a completely different direction, but it should still be interesting. Four great things about this trailer. One, it's Resident Evil. Two, Milla Jovovich. Three, Ali Larter (also in the excellent TV series Heroes).

And fourth… listen to the music used in the beginning of the trailer, during the 'commercial' part. You know who that is? Yeah… that's The Crystal Method, my favorite group. That particular song is “I Know It's You” featuring vocals from none other than Milla Jovovich herself. Could it get any sweeter? I submit that it could not.

Transformers

I'm too young to have been truly into the original Transformers cartoons and toys, but man are they awesome. For a while I was really into the animated series Beast Wars, which was a spinoff of sorts on the original Transformers… not quite the same thing, but close enough to still have me psyched for this movie. Besides, with a trailer like this, how could you not be excited? Turns out my original assumption about some of the characters in this one was wrong… there's a shot in the trailer of a bot crawling out of a pool… I assumed it would be a character similar to Depth Charge but it appears it might actually be Megatron himself. Nobody seems to agree who it really is, most people are thinking it's just a protoform (meaning, a transformer without a transformer body).

The only problem with an opening-night ticket for this is that it's releasing on July 4th… so we'll see. Plus, I imagine the theatres are going to be sold out for that night.

Spider-Man 3

Everything I've seen and heard about this movie says it's going to be purely amazing. There are three confirmed villains — Sandman, Venom, and the Green Goblin (part two, I suppose) — for this one, with a rumor circulating that Mysterio might make an appearance (though there's nothing listed in the credits or much of anywhere else at all). All that plus Kirsten Dunst. Holy crap. This is going to be an awesome movie.

Everything else.

I'm not usually much of an opening-night-movies kind of guy, but these are going to have to be exceptions. Good year for movies indeed.

Every once in a while, a truly wonderful movie comes along. A movie so profound, so meaningful and packed with thought-provoking plot elements, you can’t help but weep at its beauty. A movie so symbolic and awe-inspiring, it can make you rethink your life.

Snakes on a Plane is not that movie.

Tonight I had the honor privelege spare time to watch this magnificent piece of cinematography. I had it on my Netflix queue, seeing as it was one of those movies last year that gained an instant cult following, even months before it was released. My roommate went to see it in theatres last year… he came back and all he could say was, “You go in thinking, it can’t possibly be two hours of snakes on a plane. But it is.”

It most definitely is. It is an hour and forty-six minutes’ worth of snakes on a plane, and Samuel L. Jackson doing his damndest to fight them off. Because, you know, it’s a piece of cake to fight off poisonous snakes with little more than broken bottles, sporks, and microwaves — which conveniently have a ’snake’ setting, apparently. No kidding, watch it in slow-mo.

I… I can’t believe I just watched a movie about snakes on a plane. Wow. Gotta love the quality acting — passionately delivered lines like “I gotta get off this plane,” when you’re in a metal tube several thousand feet over the Pacific Ocean are pure genius. Nah, I understand it was intended to be a comic “horror” movie, but man. That was bad. About thirty minutes into it, I found myself thinking, “well… damn. What are they going to do for the next hour and a half?”

More snakes on a plane.

I recently started a one-month trial period with Netflix, and as such I need a good list of movies to queue up for delivery. Right now in my queue I have a few action/suspense/drama/thriller movies, but really I'm open to suggestions in just about any genres. I recently received a great comedy called Thank You for Smoking and Pi: Faith in Chaos (haven't watched it yet), and am waiting to watch London (starring the most beautiful Jessica Biel and with a soundtrack by The Crystal Method) and The Machinist (the plot of which sounds a bit like Fight Club).

So… any movie recommendations?