The Dotted Logline

Normally I avoid movie spoilers whenever possible, but when a friend pointed me to the Batman Begins screenplay online, I had to read it. After the property went so far down the toilet with the last release, I have been a bit concerned about the upcoming movie.

While I did find a few spots that could have been trimmed, I really liked it overall. It is the first time a non-animated film has really FELT like the “real” Batman. With a top notch cast and what appears to be reasonable directing based on the clips in the trailers, I’m very excited. My one concern is that the weakest character (the artificial love interest) is played by what is probably the weakest actor (Katie Holmes). Luckily, that’s not a terribly important element of the film.

While I wouldn’t say I’m a huge Kevin Smith fan, I have enjoyed the movies of his that I’ve seen (which is all of them except Mallrats) and especially liked Dogma. But the bad reviews of Jersey Girl had kept me away and I wasn’t terribly interested in seeing it when my family rented it.

But I was pleasantly surprised. There were some odd contrasts, with it feeling like a family film one moment and Liv Tyler talking about how she masturbates twice a day the next. But the acting was good, the writing was funny, and the story flowed reasonably well (though it could have been a little tighter in some spots.) Overall, it was an enjoyable movie, and I regret I avoided it for as long as I did. Though when I checked, I found Roger Ebert gave it a good review, so yet again I find that I should look at what he says more than any other critic.

I went and saw The Incredibles again, this time with my dad and sister. My father is pretty blah on anything animated, but he rather enjoyed this movie.

My dad pointed out something I hadn’t noticed the first time I saw the film. As he loves to point out, night scenes in movies are often filmed during the day using night filters, resulting in a scene that looks like it is nighttime but still has very strong shadows from the daylight. The night scenes in the jungle in The Incredibles had the same shadows. However, this was a computer animated film, which means the animators actually ADDED those shadows to make the scene resemble something with a night filter.

I love it when artists add little details like that that maybe only one in a thousand viewers will catch. It speaks volumes about the care and attention they lavish on their work.

I went and saw The Incredibles today. I’d really been looking forward to it, not in the least because I’m writing a superhero satire myself. Overall, I really enjoyed the movie. There were a few points where I just couldn’t follow the character’s thought process  but that might have just been because I was very tired.

This is definitely not a movie for little kids. There were a quite a few at the showing I attended and I’m sure a number of them are still traumatized. There were a couple of points where the darkness surprised even me. Maybe I’m just too used to family movies that  show the bad guys parachuting to safety when their vehicles blow up. One of the things I admired about the last movie by director Brad Bird, The Iron Giant, was its unflinching acceptance of the reality of death. Still, there’s something inside of you that just cracks when you see a mother explaining to her kids that the bad guys won’t hold back on account of them: “They WILL kill you.”

I have to say that this movie really showed what it really takes to be a superhero. The secret isn’t the super powers.  It’s reaction time and adaptability. The action scenes are amazingly frenetic, to the point where you can still manage to follow along but you can’t understand how the characters, animated or not, are able to take out that many enemies and avoid that many blows in that little time. It’s even more amazing (or incredible) when you consider that most of the scenes involve heroes either brand new to the game or badly out of practice.

Over all, it’s a fun movie that explores the human side of superheroes, a great step forward in computer animation, and a loving satire of comic books from someone who’s clearly a fan. This is the first movie in a long time that I want to go see in the theater again, as well as buy lots of fun merchandise from. God help me.

Halloween is the time of year I catch up on horror movies I have yet to see or rewatch old favorites, since they are all handily available on any number of TV channels. One of the more interesting films I saw for the first time was The Omen. I didn’t really find it that scary, but I did think was fantastic in an artistic sense. My favorite moment was probably the closeup of the nanny’s face during her battle royale with the father; something about that rabid determination was much creepier than any of the deaths.

I didn’t see all of the second Omen movie, but I have to say that Damien’s reaction to his true identity was really well done. That kid had some decent acting chops. The third movie was just really horrific. With Damien as an adult, a lot of the power of the first two movies was gone, so they went for shock value instead. The modern-day King Herod slaughter of the children was especially disturbing. That is one of the interesting things about horror movies though… sometimes even the stupid ones can force you to confront the emotional impact of something (like the murder of many tiny babies) that you would normally compartmentalize away as numbers or a historical event or freak occurrence.

Overall, my favorite movie experience was rewatching Scream 2. Although I don’t care that much for the ending of the second one (at least the choice of murderers), the first two Scream movies do an excellent job of satirizing a genre while still being a strong entry into that genre. The opening sequence of Scream 2 is especially brilliant: a horror movie sequel starting in a movie theater showing a horror movie based on the events of the original horror movie. I could probably go on for a while about the great elements in that scene, but do yourself a favor and go watch it if you’ve never seen the movie.

My family had a little viewing of Superman: The Movie, which I hadn’t seen for a number of years. There were a number of things that were rather silly, like Kryptonian technology being powered by hula hoops and Marlon Brando looking like he is reading his lines at some points (which according to legend, he is.) And it’s especially odd seeing Brando get top billing, then Gene Hackman, THEN Christopher Reeves.

But what really struck me was the scene with the first appearance of Superman in Metropolis. It wasn’t anything especially spectacular: catching first Lois Lane and then a damaged helicopter as they fell off the roof of the Daily Planet. But the reaction of the crowd, first astonishment, then joy, was really quite beautiful in a very honest and innocent way. I’ve never really been a Superman fan, but I can’t deny there is a real power to the concept of that moment of realization.

I was shocked last week when I read that Reeve had passed away. When I was a kid, the earliest “grown-up” movie I remember seeing was Superman III, perhaps not the best movie experience, but very memorable, especially the Clark Kent/Superman fight in the junkyard. Like so many other people, Reeve was synonymous with Superman for me, and his riding accident and subsequent paralysis was shocking.

But Reeve showed he was a real hero, not only through his work promoting funding for research into reversing spinal cord damage, but his continued involvement with the film industry, which he clearly loved. His appearance as a scientist on Smallville, with hints of the classic John Williams theme worked into the score, was one of the most touching television moments I’ve ever seen.

I am sorry that Christopher Reeve was never able to walk again, like he wished. But maybe now, he’s flying, and flashing us that trademark smile on the way.

I just watched Thirteen Going On Thirty and while I’m not a fan of the “throw innocent people into totally alien situations that they don’t know how to deal with so we can laugh as they fumble around and make fools of themselves” genre, I think Jennifer Garner pulled off the part quite nicely. I always like actors better when they look like they really had fun with a role.

The one bit that really jumped out at me was the big magazine party sequence, which was a crashing bore until Jenna (Jennifer Garner) got the DJ to play Thriller, started doing the grooving zombie dance (which she remembered clearly because she’d been doing it in 1987 the day before), and slowly had a large crowd join her who all also remembered the dance and could do it in a beautiful unified group.

I have an irrational love of spontaneous large dance numbers that pop up for no clear reason in non-musical movies. I haven’t seen many (in fact, the only one I can think of off the top of my head is the prom in She’s All That), but if I have my way, I’ll work one into one of my own scripts someday. Seeing Song and dance pop up like that in “real world” settings (as opposed to musicals) gives us all hope that maybe one day, it could happen to us. Without a zoot suit demon and people spontaneously combusting, of course.

I recently rewatched one of the first sci-fi films I ever saw, Logan’s Run. I was glad to see that it still stood up as a pretty decent film. The visual effects (which won an Oscar the year before Star Wars) are laughable, especially the blatant miniature sets and the bizarre pyrotechnics. There are plenty of acid-trip visuals and gratuitous sex/nudity scenes that scream 1970’s. The worst thing in the film is probably Box, who looks like the result of a breeding accident between a vacuum cleaner and a disco ball.

But the dystopian future story still holds up. The concept a society devoted to pleasure is a logical progression from today’s world. Michael York (Logan 5) feels a bit too theatrical in some scenes, but his emotion when he receives his assignment from the computer is still chilling today. Peter Ustinov steals the movie as the half-senile T.S. Elliot-quoting Old Man, but my favorite performance is Richard Jordan as Francis 7, Logan’s friend and fellow Sandman. Jordan plays the extreme emotional arch quite well despite limited screen time.

I really need to track down and read the novel that inspired the movie, as it is quite a bit different. The Bryan Singer film project which may or may not happen now is/was supposed to be much closer to the source material than the original film was, so it will be interesting to see the story he will be/would have been working with.

In a semi-interesting related note, I had the opportunity to meet Michael York when he visited University of Miami when I was an undergrad. At the time, he was best known by college-age students for his role in the Austin Powers movies, but when I got a second to speak with him, I told him I remembered him from Logan’s Run, which I had seen as a kid. He didn’t seem exceptionally thrilled by that, but he was still very cordial.

I’ve never been a fan of “so bad they’re good” movies. That changed when I was dragged to see Alien vs Predator last Friday. I have yet to see any of the Alien or Predator movies but my friends assured that it wouldn’t matter. All I needed to know was that this was going to be a bad movie. Despite that glowing recommendation, I dropped the $10+ for the ticket, the first non-matinée showing I’d been to in Boston.

And AvP turned out to be one of the funniest, most enjoyable movie experiences I’ve had in quite a while.

The acting was so bad that any time anyone opened their mouth, it was hilarious. There were a few brief fight scenes that were fairly cool but most of it was just silly. The remaining human (woman) and remaining Predator who ended up teaming up had a bizarre buddy cop/star-crossed lovers vibe that just killed me. And when you are with a group who is also laughing at everything, it’s just that much funnier.

The great thing about bad movies is the laughs don’t end with the final scene. Reading reviews where critics really get their digs in provides a whole new level of entertainment. Perhaps my favorite line from the AvP reviews I read is this zinger by MaryAnn Johanson of Flick Filosopher:

“How many awful, monotonous, stupid movies does Anderson have to make before they take away his scissors and crayons?”

Most of the movies I’ve seen recently that I expected to be reasonably good have disappointed me. I think every now and then, I’ll make it a point to watch a movie that is blatantly awful. It’s hard to have your expectations ruined when you don’t have any to begin with.

Today I saw The Bourne Supremacy. Aside from reinforcing my hatred of non-stadium seating theaters and teaching me that that hand-held shooting equals eye-strain headache, I found the characters and story to be seriously lacking, which I wasn’t expecting with the positive reviews. Part of the problem may be that I never saw The Bourne Identity, but the overall empty feel of the movie really turned me off. I have nothing against action movies in general, but like special effects and eye-candy actors, action cannot and should not be expected to carry a film.

Sometimes I think the movie-going public is at the heart of the problem. It’s possible to make decent films within the bounds of the standard genre formulas–the basic three act story structure in screenwriting works for the vast majority of movies. But the cost of producing and marketing a major studio picture has gotten so high that of course the studios are going to go with what has been proven to sell well such a huge investment on the line. Hollywood is a business and they are going to with the product that is most likely to be successful.

So is the majority of the movie-going public really too lazy or too wary to try to watch anything that stretches their mind in any way? Are movies expected to remain solely as a form of escapism, while other art forms are left to say something meaningful? Or have increasing ticket prices and expanding alternative entertainment venues left the public much more selective and less adventurous then they should be? I really don’t know. But in the business of entertainment, it is the demand of the consumer that is most likely to influence any sort of artistic change. Until more people decide that they are tired of the regurgitated and hollow crap that too often opens to a much larger box office than it deserves, that’s what we’ll all be stuck with.