Saw "Mamma Mia!" and laughed my ass off.
Will probably do the same at "Tropic Thunder," the guy-comedy answer to "Mamma Mia!"
Honestly, go see Kung Fu Panda...
freaking funny!
I can't believe they left Robin out of The Dark Knight. What's Batman without Robin?
I can't believe they left Robin out of The Dark Knight. What's Batman without Robin?
Much more "realistic." Yes, I know that no superhero movie is realistic, but why would a vigilante take along a twelve-year boy as a partner? On the theory that "well, I'm breaking laws by the bushel, what's adding child endangerment going to matter?"
Perhaps a better way of thinking about TDK is that it isn't a superhero movie, it's more of a crime drama. Like Heat, or To Live and Die in L.A., or even French Connection. Psychologically compelling characters are placed into situations where they have to choose between something bad, and something worse, and the consequences do follow, and they hit hard -- on the guilty AND the innocent.
It does follow the recent trend of comic book movies in being made by filmmakers that respect the source material, and by being extremely well-cast. When I learned that Michael Caine and Gary Oldham were cast as Alfred and Gordon in Batman Begins, my thought was "damn, this director is SERIOUS.
Damnit, that was Gary OLDMAN! You'd think I would know better. 
Well, since you asked...:o)
The latest "Mummy" flick sucked. They should never have excavated the thing. "He" stank.
Journey to the Center of the Low-Popcorn-Sales-place also sucked. (No more Brendan Fraser flicks for me...)
Caught "The Other Bolyn Girl" on DVD. I've seen worse period flicks, and I've seen a lot better. The history was, predictably, soap-opera'd up some. Johansson and Portman were nice eye-candy.
But if you want the juicy Tudor stuff, catch the Showtime series.:o)
In one episode last year, Sam Neill, taking a break from Jurassic Park and playing Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII's Machiavellian schemer, is being grovelled at by a young applicant who aspires to become one of his spies:
Tyro: "I will be an eagle for you."
Wolsey: "No! Be a seagull and shit on everyone!" :o)
But the movie I've REALLY enjoyed, is "Angela", the French flick (on DVD) about a screaming hot, leggy-blonde-of-an-Angel who comes down to rescue this runt (he's about a foot shorter than is she) of an Algerian (Morrocan?) who's pretty much of a total fuckup who's always in arrears on gambling debts with various families of the Paris mob, and they're threatening to break his legs if he doesn't pay up.
Depressed about his nothing life, he's standing on a Paris bridge abutment, getting ready to jump into the Seine, when he spots her, one abutment down, about to do the same thing. She jumps, and he jumps in and saves her. And she (ostensibly) starts hooking to make money to help him pay off his huge bills.
This bothers him, but they take care of his debts, and in the process, they bitch, fight, have some hilarious dialogue and some touching scenes, too (thank Allah for French movies, which always seem to be human and humane) and, of course, fall in love. :o)
It's sweet, raunchy, profane, and funny as hell. :o) I loved it. I Finally bought it and started passing it around to my friends. They love it, too.
Jim Bob Tanbark gives it a 9, fer shure.
(Hope no one minds subtitles...)
And, speaking of eye candy, here's a clip of two of the finest Tangeros in the world; Geraldine Rojas, and her husband, Ezequiel Paludi.
About two years ago, they rocked the Tango world when they finally split their partners (after LOTS of drama, in which Ezequial, for YEARS, had been plighting his troth to her and telling her that they were born for each other, but she didn't want to leave her main man and partner, Javier Rodriguez, for fear it would damage her standing at the top of the Tango world.
Love conquered, and boy, does it show in this clip of them dancing at a Tango festival last year. :o)
Some of what is called Tango can be overly dramatic with way too much of brittle gymnastics, and Hollywoodish, mega-stylized technique, for my taste.
Not this.:o)
The dance originated in the whorehouses of Buenos Aires. The Catholic Church tried to stamp it out, and various juntas have tried to suppress it. No luck, I'm delighted to say. :o)
AND I've never seen the lyric combination of romance and sensuality expressed the way Geraldine and Ezequial "speak" it in this clip.
Buenos Noches, y'all. :o)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=7...feature=related
Sen Leahy? Whoa, I totally missed that.
Thanks for the heads up, tlg.
We haven't been doing much theater-going this summer, and our choices have been pretty low-brow. We've only seen three films: the Indiana Jones movie (which sucked on toast), the second Narnia movie (much darker and far less "twee" than the first), and then Hellboy II this last weekend.
I quite enjoyed HII. More than the first one, actually. Guillermo del Toro has a unique visual sense, although I think he ... shall we say ... "heavily based" one of the creature designs on an illustration by Granville, a 19th Century French illustrator of the fantastic.
The story's not too bad, either; it ends up going in a very different direction than I'd expected.
I'll have to check out the Hellboy movies. And Grandville is one of my favorite illustrators.
I only average less than one movie a month, but "In Bruges" is my favorite so far. Two Irish hitmen are ordered by their boss (Ralph Fiennes) to lie low in Bruges after a hit. One of them is thrilled to be in the only surviving medieval town in Europe. The other (Colin Farrell) thinks it's a shithole, but he manages to chat up a pretty drug dealer supplying a movie crew in town for a shoot. I think it's a homage to "Living In Oblivion" because it features a dwarf (Jordan Prentice, who I confused with Peter Dinklage from "LIO") who's cast for dream sequences and thinks the movie is a pretentious piece of crap.
Lots of twists and turns, comedy, drama, fistfights, a gunfight, and loads of references to yet another great movie I can't name as it's sort of a spoiler.
Thanks for the link, but the review on The G Spot was written not by me, but my friend J. Robert Parks. I've added a byline to his review to reflect that fact.
I'm huge movie fan but Batman and other comic book-type movies are not really my thing. I'm not planning to see The Dark Knight because I doubt I'd enjoy it. But I love my friend J. Robert's movie reviews and I'm thrilled to have his writing on the site!
But the politics are convoluted enough that some conservatives can legitimately claim Batman as their own. The Joker would likely run wild if he were not confronted by the unstoppable force of Batman. And Batman only locates the Joker at the end by spying on every citizen in Gotham. And most troubling for leftists of a certain view is that the film shows how easy it is for good intentions to be overwhelmed by awful realities and how those awful realities must sometimes be fought with violence.
This paragraph, specifically the word reality, sums up everything that has gone wrong in the past 8 years. The Joker is literally a comic book super-villain in particular he's one that was specifically created to justify the existence of Batman. It's Voltaire's Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. made flesh.
Keep in mind that I'm a massive fanboy but I've never really been a big bats fan. I'm much more a Warren Ellis/Adam Warren type, where hero's have to think their way out of everything. In fact Ellis' Batman like character Midnighter's primary super power is that he literally thinks everything (all possible outcomes and possibilities) through.
I do want to the the movie, but it's not the "frame" we need now. Best to grab a trade paperback of "StormWatch: Change or Die" by Ellis, or watch "Patlabor 2".
In particular I cannot stress how much "Patlabor 2" is the "frame" for the present time. A shadowy villain spectacularly destroys a crucial landmark in Tokyo, and follows up with highly sophisticated attacks. Civilian rule is crumbling and the SDF Garrisons Tokyo. But the whole aim of the villain is to achieve just that. Our heros specifically don't play into that. Capt. Goto and his squad resolve the problem with solid police work, political maneuver, and by strictly sticking to the book. Specifically Det. Matsui cracks the case by following the villain's "Women and Money". While giant robots do see action, they essentially only serve as a MacGuffin.
The movie I really want to see is the adaptation of 'Ocean' by Ellis in which an existential threat to Earth is resolved by a UN Weapons inspector who hates guns and a bunch of geeks.
ignoring your wise warnings, I went to see the Mummy 3 last night.
bummer
Gatoress; where's the House Un-American Activities Committee, to blacklist Brendan Fraser, when we need them? :o)
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