Let's get down to grading these papers - everything I actually got to see on a big screen (some via a Blu-Ray projector, which will have to count from now on) in order of my preference, with scholastic grading applied. There's still a few days between Boxing Day and New Year's Day to see True Grit and a couple other movies that are playing so this stands a chance of getting revised over the course of the week. So this list will go up at DVDTalk and OKCupid when that happens, and I welcome any twitter followers as well!
MOVIE OF THE YEAR: Inception
HONORABLE MENTION: Nine (2009)
RUNNER UP(S): The Millenium Trilogy (Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Girl Who Played With Fire, Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest)
Machete
Shutter Island (2009)
Micmacs
Harry Brown
Black Swan
Red
Never Let Me Go
Ou Est La Main
Sherlock Holmes
Inside Job
Life During Wartime
The American
The Tempest
City Of Your Final Destination
The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Phil Spector
The Ghost Writer
The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus
L'empreinte De L'ange
Date Night
Catfish
Iron Man 2
Tron: Legacy
George A. Romero's Survival Of The Dead
Countdown To Zero
Avatar (2009)
Salt
City Island
The Expendables
The Lovely Bones
Freakonomics
Legion
Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland
The Room (an eternal Turkey)
BEST REVIVALS AND RESTORATIONS
Metropolis
Steve Shelley's Archives (Pink Floyd specifically)
The Third Man
Kid With The Golden Arm
Dirty Money
The Godfather
Dario Argento's Deep Red
Election
The Brood
Superfly
The Crazies (George Romero 1973 original)
What do you think?
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
The 2010 Short Oscars: Animated!
I got to see the Animated nominees a little earlier than I thought I would. As usual, fantastic storytelling and a wide palette ranging from nasty humor to dark melodrama is here. The 3D thing has almost completely overtaken the program, and good old fashioned cell animation or even Flash is seeming almost a thing of nostalgia these days. The blazing exception, and hands down my favorite, is "Logorama", a dizzying nightmare in rotoscope told entirely in corporate logos and mascots. Yes, you read that right. An urban nightmare and apocalyptic specter is rendered using a homicidal Ronald McDonald, lecherous Pringles characters, and the fall of planet Pepsi. Of course this is France's entry, as an American animator would be hung up by his packaging for making a movie like this, and it's our loss. I haven't seen animation this nasty and subversive since the coke damaged 80s era of "Ren And Stimpy" or "Jack Mac and Rad Boy", which is saying something.
On a completely different tip is the latest from Wallace And Gromit representing Britain in "A Matter Of Loaf And Death", involving true love for Wallace and Gromit too amidst a murder spree affecting bakers like our heroes. Even funnier is Spain's "The Lady And The Reaper", which turns a little old lady's acceptance of death into a Tex Avery-esque battle between the Grim Reaper and a vain surgeon. There are many other entries in the current program scoring Noteworthy status - whatever that means - including Canada's "Runaway", about a runaway train and the nebbish assistant driver who tries desperately to save the day. It's the other 2D entry and it's a beaut, simply drawn and full of great sight gags.
So that's both programs. Watch them online right now!
BTW Anyone want to explain why shorts are not shown before movies anymore but commercials are?
On a completely different tip is the latest from Wallace And Gromit representing Britain in "A Matter Of Loaf And Death", involving true love for Wallace and Gromit too amidst a murder spree affecting bakers like our heroes. Even funnier is Spain's "The Lady And The Reaper", which turns a little old lady's acceptance of death into a Tex Avery-esque battle between the Grim Reaper and a vain surgeon. There are many other entries in the current program scoring Noteworthy status - whatever that means - including Canada's "Runaway", about a runaway train and the nebbish assistant driver who tries desperately to save the day. It's the other 2D entry and it's a beaut, simply drawn and full of great sight gags.
So that's both programs. Watch them online right now!
BTW Anyone want to explain why shorts are not shown before movies anymore but commercials are?
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Short Subject Oscars 2010
This week is the Live Action subjects, and for those who saw last year's nominees, I can wholeheartedly say this year offers a vastly improved quintet of pieces. Hard to pick a winner out of this bunch, but for me it would be "The New Tenants". The one recognizable face is Vincent D'Onofrio, as a cuckolded husband and one of the many characters that pass through a gay couple's door in one fateful sequence of events. Sure it could be a one act play, but I'll take it on film too. I very much loved "Instead Of Abracadabra" as well, a hilarious story of a struggling magician trying to impress a girl, his conservative parents and local audiences at the same time. Very reminiscent of Wes Anderson in it's celebration of nerdy achievement and it's unremittingly cheerful outlook.
I'll be back soon with the Animated Program! ETA Watch all the shorts right now!
I'll be back soon with the Animated Program! ETA Watch all the shorts right now!
Friday, January 1, 2010
Ranking the Movies of 2009
It's that time of year again. Well, last year the time never occurred for personal reasons, so this year I'm back with a vengeance. A big shout out to any visitors from dvdtalk.com, and also to my tweet and Facebook followers, and friends from sites like Absolute Write. Welcome to my hole in the virtual wall.
As always, this is only theatrical films, ranked as I feel they should be. 2008 movies get a * marking. Drum roll and raise your pints, folks...
MOVIE OF THE YEAR: Moon
HONORABLE MENTION: Gran Torino (from 2008, but certainly at the top of either year's list)
SILVER: The Men Who Stare At Goats
BRONZE: A Serious Man
The Brothers Bloom
The Road
Inglorious Basterds
Broken Embraces
Soul Power
* The Dark Knight IMAX Experience
Let The Right One In
Gomorrah
The Hurt Locker
The Fantastic Mr Fox
Cold Souls
Watchmen
In The Loop
Food, Inc.
Angels And Demons
Nine (Tim Burton produced animation, will see the musical in 2010)
Antichrist
* The Wrestler
Tetro
Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
A Perfect Getaway
Star Trek
Zombieland
2012
TURKEY OF THE YEAR: The Informant! / The Girlfriend Experience (Special mention tie. Steven Soderbergh, get with the program!)
DISHONORABLE MENTION: Frank Miller's The Spirit (another 2008 entry, but deserving of special warning to the curious)
And here are special events and revivals deserving of special praise or infamy. Support your local movie theater!
Mishima (with Paul Schrader)
El Topo (remastered and original Spanish with subtitles)
Near Dark
Monty Python's Life Of Brian
The Oscar Shorts Live Action and Animated
Alien
Jaws
All That Jazz
Todd Haynes' Safe
The Big Lebowski (with costume contest)
Barbarella
From Beyond (with screenwriter Dennis Paoli)
Piranha
And don't forget the Brooklyn Film Festival and Focus on French Cinema in Westchester, just a couple of great festivals that are coming back this year. And the greatest website of them all, netflix.com (Best Video of Hamden is pretty good, too ;) )
Hope next year is just as good!
As always, this is only theatrical films, ranked as I feel they should be. 2008 movies get a * marking. Drum roll and raise your pints, folks...
MOVIE OF THE YEAR: Moon
HONORABLE MENTION: Gran Torino (from 2008, but certainly at the top of either year's list)
SILVER: The Men Who Stare At Goats
BRONZE: A Serious Man
The Brothers Bloom
The Road
Inglorious Basterds
Broken Embraces
Soul Power
* The Dark Knight IMAX Experience
Let The Right One In
Gomorrah
The Hurt Locker
The Fantastic Mr Fox
Cold Souls
Watchmen
In The Loop
Food, Inc.
Angels And Demons
Nine (Tim Burton produced animation, will see the musical in 2010)
Antichrist
* The Wrestler
Tetro
Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
A Perfect Getaway
Star Trek
Zombieland
2012
TURKEY OF THE YEAR: The Informant! / The Girlfriend Experience (Special mention tie. Steven Soderbergh, get with the program!)
DISHONORABLE MENTION: Frank Miller's The Spirit (another 2008 entry, but deserving of special warning to the curious)
And here are special events and revivals deserving of special praise or infamy. Support your local movie theater!
Mishima (with Paul Schrader)
El Topo (remastered and original Spanish with subtitles)
Near Dark
Monty Python's Life Of Brian
The Oscar Shorts Live Action and Animated
Alien
Jaws
All That Jazz
Todd Haynes' Safe
The Big Lebowski (with costume contest)
Barbarella
From Beyond (with screenwriter Dennis Paoli)
Piranha
And don't forget the Brooklyn Film Festival and Focus on French Cinema in Westchester, just a couple of great festivals that are coming back this year. And the greatest website of them all, netflix.com (Best Video of Hamden is pretty good, too ;) )
Hope next year is just as good!
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Burnin' Down The Country Club
(Finally, a long essay! Something more than a tweet or bulletin board post can do justice to. Enjoy or endure as you will.)
Imagine climbing a mountain. Steep, cold, harsh, just you and the elements. One little mistake, one weakness in any part of your body or mind, and it's all over for you. But you climb the mountain because you need to, because you love to. And finally you reach the mountaintop, to find...
Another mountain.
Steeper, harsher, and now flanked by militia nuts who wish you harm.
Welcome to a professional artist's world.
In my main field, script writing, new writers are under fire. More so than normal, if such a thing is possible. Terry Rossio advises young artists to "Throw In The Towel"*. Josh Olson declares that "I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script", and Harlan Ellison eagerly echoes the sentiment in rhyme.
I think writers are in need of a little love right now.
I've been covering amateur scripts with my internship and reading and critiquing the same for over 6 years now. I'm up to about 100 a year, two or three a week. (A professional can cover two or more a DAY. But no one is paying me, and I have a life, kinda.) And I'll let you in on a little secret.
They're not all that bad.
There's a dozen or so in recent memory that made me want to hit the writers for making me look at that garbage. There's also three or so a year that overjoy me, that make me wish I was an agent and I could force someone into giving them a big bag of money to film the movie. Legalities prevent me from telling you all about them here, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
The rest are in the middle. The authors can spell and understand how humans talk. The story is energetic, has good flow, involves emotionally in some way. The script, in a word, is good. Good is worthless in Hollywood. Good won't get you a cab ride in LA, or anywhere else. There are simply too many good or really good scripts out there, which is why we have development executives and story analysts and paid readers to dig through them for treasure.
But what of the great, the fantastic, the inspiring? They've always had a tough ride to the top, but is the hate for the untried author turning into a lynch mob of sorts?
Don't misunderstand, the hunt for work is challenging. It builds emotional strength, and it proves one is willing to work hard in this profession. But has a good defense turned into an aggressive offense? Call me paranoid, but are the hard working and imaginative getting swept up in the witch hunt along with the drunks, posers and starstruck teens that have always comprised amateur hour? What a tragic thing that would be. A tragedy of epic proportions.
Or let's look at it a little more cynically: where will the fresh meat come from now? Hollywood has had one of the worst years since...ever. What can you say about a year when the #1 movie is about big toys? And it's getting worse. How badly do you want to see what's opening this weekend?
If there's something that does catch your eye, I bet it has to do with the idea. The poster, the trailer: these are the parades heralding that magic thing in Hollywood, the thing called The Good Idea. Accompanying it are snappy lines that make you laugh, or a riddle that makes you think, or a depraved threat that makes you lose sleep when you think about it. This is what we do. Everyone thinks they can do it, so everyone tries. And as any Hollywood reader, development exec or story analyst will tell you, everyone fails.
Well, almost everyone. The recording industry was only as good as the songs on the top 10, and the movie industry is only as good as the movies in octoplexes this weekend. And the blockbuster movies all start with one special ingredient.
They start with a great script.
Let's go back to the mountain - you've made it up the mountain beyond the other mountain, eluded the commandoes and not fallen to a painful death. Now there at the mountaintop, surrounded by nothing but sky, is a beautiful club house full of elegantly dressed people. They look up from their strong stylish drinks to look at you, and they point.
And laugh. They're laughing at you. And they point down, as if to say hope you enjoyed the climb, now go back to Idaho where you belong. Meet the new country club, same as the old country club.
Maybe burning down this club is a harsh idea. Better to build our own clubhouse. Or screw the clubhouses, just create a new Hollywood, as one kid on a internet BBS suggested. Our own studios without red tape and marketing firms, just artists with common sense and uncommon talent. It's how it all started. It can happen again.
*I cannot post a direct link because when links to same and credited quotes came up on a website bulletin board I frequent, the author threatened to have the admins sued and ARRESTED if all quotes and links were not immediately deleted. Gee, who'd a thunk promoting your publicly viewable website is a bad thing? What country is this again?
Imagine climbing a mountain. Steep, cold, harsh, just you and the elements. One little mistake, one weakness in any part of your body or mind, and it's all over for you. But you climb the mountain because you need to, because you love to. And finally you reach the mountaintop, to find...
Another mountain.
Steeper, harsher, and now flanked by militia nuts who wish you harm.
Welcome to a professional artist's world.
In my main field, script writing, new writers are under fire. More so than normal, if such a thing is possible. Terry Rossio advises young artists to "Throw In The Towel"*. Josh Olson declares that "I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script", and Harlan Ellison eagerly echoes the sentiment in rhyme.
I think writers are in need of a little love right now.
I've been covering amateur scripts with my internship and reading and critiquing the same for over 6 years now. I'm up to about 100 a year, two or three a week. (A professional can cover two or more a DAY. But no one is paying me, and I have a life, kinda.) And I'll let you in on a little secret.
They're not all that bad.
There's a dozen or so in recent memory that made me want to hit the writers for making me look at that garbage. There's also three or so a year that overjoy me, that make me wish I was an agent and I could force someone into giving them a big bag of money to film the movie. Legalities prevent me from telling you all about them here, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
The rest are in the middle. The authors can spell and understand how humans talk. The story is energetic, has good flow, involves emotionally in some way. The script, in a word, is good. Good is worthless in Hollywood. Good won't get you a cab ride in LA, or anywhere else. There are simply too many good or really good scripts out there, which is why we have development executives and story analysts and paid readers to dig through them for treasure.
But what of the great, the fantastic, the inspiring? They've always had a tough ride to the top, but is the hate for the untried author turning into a lynch mob of sorts?
Don't misunderstand, the hunt for work is challenging. It builds emotional strength, and it proves one is willing to work hard in this profession. But has a good defense turned into an aggressive offense? Call me paranoid, but are the hard working and imaginative getting swept up in the witch hunt along with the drunks, posers and starstruck teens that have always comprised amateur hour? What a tragic thing that would be. A tragedy of epic proportions.
Or let's look at it a little more cynically: where will the fresh meat come from now? Hollywood has had one of the worst years since...ever. What can you say about a year when the #1 movie is about big toys? And it's getting worse. How badly do you want to see what's opening this weekend?
If there's something that does catch your eye, I bet it has to do with the idea. The poster, the trailer: these are the parades heralding that magic thing in Hollywood, the thing called The Good Idea. Accompanying it are snappy lines that make you laugh, or a riddle that makes you think, or a depraved threat that makes you lose sleep when you think about it. This is what we do. Everyone thinks they can do it, so everyone tries. And as any Hollywood reader, development exec or story analyst will tell you, everyone fails.
Well, almost everyone. The recording industry was only as good as the songs on the top 10, and the movie industry is only as good as the movies in octoplexes this weekend. And the blockbuster movies all start with one special ingredient.
They start with a great script.
Let's go back to the mountain - you've made it up the mountain beyond the other mountain, eluded the commandoes and not fallen to a painful death. Now there at the mountaintop, surrounded by nothing but sky, is a beautiful club house full of elegantly dressed people. They look up from their strong stylish drinks to look at you, and they point.
And laugh. They're laughing at you. And they point down, as if to say hope you enjoyed the climb, now go back to Idaho where you belong. Meet the new country club, same as the old country club.
Maybe burning down this club is a harsh idea. Better to build our own clubhouse. Or screw the clubhouses, just create a new Hollywood, as one kid on a internet BBS suggested. Our own studios without red tape and marketing firms, just artists with common sense and uncommon talent. It's how it all started. It can happen again.
*I cannot post a direct link because when links to same and credited quotes came up on a website bulletin board I frequent, the author threatened to have the admins sued and ARRESTED if all quotes and links were not immediately deleted. Gee, who'd a thunk promoting your publicly viewable website is a bad thing? What country is this again?
Monday, May 25, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
My blog is back up
I updated my main page with an improved CSS look and for some reason lost the current link. Sorry about that, if you noticed.
On a related note, I may have reached an impasse with any delusions of being a professional programmer I might have harbored. At least my script reading career is doing well, as far as an internship can be considered a career.
On a related note, I may have reached an impasse with any delusions of being a professional programmer I might have harbored. At least my script reading career is doing well, as far as an internship can be considered a career.
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