soapbox

So this story is a week old but it’s been a busy week and I couldn’t be that bothered to post something about Heath Ledger (although Dark Knight is pretty darn good). That said, there’s an entertaining little story about Ledger’s iPod being passed around amongst his friends/castmates.

Whenever we went into the trailer we’d say “Whose iPod is this?” Because it would always be some wacked-out music nobody had ever heard of before. And it was Heath’s. And that iPod has since become a symbol of Heath and his friends pass it around to each other, download the music and then pass it on.

<unfair sarcasm> and really, what is more personal than a bunch of medium-quality compressed music files? </unfair sarcasm>

It may be targeted at early-teen girls, but I rented Penelope this weekend and it was actually really good.

The movie follows the typical romantic comedy path: boy meets girl, something interferes, girl meets other boy, shocking twist, right boy and girl get together.

Penelope came together really well though. All of the actors and actresses did excellent jobs (it says something when Reese Witherspoon isn’t the cutest little pixie in a movie) and the story comes together nicely.

I give it two thumbs up, it’s a movie I’d let my daughter watch.*

*Wow, I’m at that point already?

I would say that the best part about this movie is that you get the comic genius of Jack Black without having to actually see his face, but that’s not fair to the movie.  This film is very well done, both conceptually and technically.  A clean but engaging animation style and several strong performances combine to produce a very fun and funny movie.  

The ‘plot’ is 100% folk tale/fable/etc, but that’s not a bad thing.  In this case predictability allows you to sit back and just enjoy the movie in all of its awesomeness… there were really maybe only two slow spots out of the whole film.  Good stuff.

… and apparently they hate him back: members of Russia’s communist party are calling for a boycott of the Crystal Skull.  The quote is funny: the movie “aims to undermine communist ideology and distort history.”

If anybody thinks that this movie will be taken at all literally, well, good on them.  We went to see it over the weekend, and K summed it up well: “I don’t think that was worth $9.50, but I would have wanted to see it eventually, and if you’re going to see it you might as well see it on the big screen.”

First, the good: it’s entertaining, it has the standard Indy elements, including the requisite bad guy being dissolved/eaten/goo-ified/etc, and has a decent chase scene.  More subtly, Harrison Ford’s age is appropriate, and they did a good job not hiding that fact and instead making it work with the story.

That said, sometimes it seemed like Ford did his own stunts, and the film was discouragingly linear.  Maybe I was hoping for too much? dunno.

Finally, back to the Russian communist boycott (wow, I feel like I’m back in the ’80s), it occurs to me that really filmmakers have very limited options.  The only acceptable baddies are white; you have to be <strong> really</strong> careful if you’re going to use middle-eastern bad guys, I don’t think you could use Japanese bad guys unless it’s a period piece, and similarly Chinese bad guys are off limits unless the movie is set in 19th-century Hong Kong or something.  So, you’re left with cultures, not races, as historical baddies: Nazi Germans (but still white) and Communist Russians (still white).  And I guess even then you’re going to piss people off.

Kirsten and I went to see Speed Racer last week. It wasn’t a particularly late show, but we ended up having the theater all to ourselves. (Well, there actually was another couple there, but they left half way through.)

Here’s the quick review: if you’re looking for a good action movie or a good story or just a good movie to kill time with, this probably isn’t it. Not that it was horrible (Rat Race is still my all-time worst movie although Ultraviolet is up there too.), but it just wasn’t that good.

The one thing that kept me in the theater though is the compositing effects that they used to shoot the movie. In The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers gave us “bullet time” by taking near-simultaneous images from a whole string of cameras. In Speed Racer, they did compositing a little bit differently. Basically, they shot the same scene multiple times simultaneously with cameras set to different focal points. Then, in post-production, the combined the different images together to give infinite depth of field. Basically, you combine the background clouds from the camera that was focussed on the clouds, the middle distance trees from the camera that was focussed on them, and the foreground actors from their own camera. In the end, the effect is much more like a cartoon than a conventional movie.

Unfortunately, that visual effect was the only good thing the movie had going for it.

So I was channel surfing this evening on our new couch (come visit!) and stumbled across this guy:

I knew the actor looked familiar but couldn’t place him.  If you answered “Don Flack from CSI:NY”, then good for you.  Or if you came up with “Lords of Dogtown”, then nicely done.  But no, I thought for a couple seconds and then came up with “Jim Craig, I mean, Eddie Cahill”.  My TV/movie/pop culture IQ is really not that good, sometimes.

IMDB is a beautiful thing.  Apparently Cahill made a guest appearance on Dawson’s Creek? and showed up in seven “Friends” episodes as Tag Jones.

Arthur C. Clarke passed away.

The quote I borrowed from in the title above is further explained here.

I read a good bit of sci-fi growing up, and Clarke’s work was really influential to me. I cut my teeth on the Asimov catalogue, as I’m sure many of y’all out there in blog-land did (and I still enjoy re-reading a few of his really top-notch short stories). That being said, I really felt I had arrived when I wrapped my mind around some of Clarke’s works, which often felt more intellectually rigorous.

For those of you who only know him through 2001 (film and/or book), I’d encourage you to check out some of his other works, particularly Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood’s End, one of my absolute all-time sci-fi favorites.