Edgy MD

For a movie that presents New Orleans as a sleazy murderous slimepit of corruption, death and the occult, you half get the idea that the New Orleans tourism bureau underwrote the thing, they way they namecheck New Orleans culture left and right. [list:33zhh3nv]"Remy, get your pants on. Angelo's bagman was just found murdered in Storyville." "Ah, not tonight. I've got tickets to see the Neville Brothers." "Just move your ass. You drive slower than a Mardis Gras float." "Wasn't his brother the one we fished out of Lake Pontchartrain?"[/list:u:33zhh3nv]

There's a certain amount of disbelief that you have to suspend for this kind of stuff. Certainly, and they owe me a convincing reason as to why. Any good storyteller has to seduce you into releasing your grip on reality. In the Iron Man films, I could. In the Asgard-character films, not so much. By the way: Loki's helmet was never not funny.

Pretty good summary.

Yeah, this one didn't shake me up either. I think it's time for me to cash in my chips with regard to superduperguy films. yeah, if this one didn't do it for you, you can join Transmonk in the anti-unicorn faction. I'm not saying its the best thing since sliced bread (and how did that food product earn its reputation for greatness anyway?), or even the best superhero movie, but it's got a nice blend of character and action, and it delivers its silliness with a sense of humor and clever self-awareness that doesn't tip into cynicism or satire. I really don't know what else people want from a big summer action film. I dug Iron Man, and Hulk and Iron Man 2 to a lesser extent. I didn't find the quality in the character and story development that you did. I did enjoy much of what they were able to make the Hulk and Captain America do. The latter was sort of like a running back in the open field, pure intuition. But what tends to happen to me in these movies is that I lose all sense of what is going on --- what these characters are capable of and the battle topography and all. Just how strong is this guy and that guy? How invulnerable? The whys, too. Why are the quite mortal and breakable characters walking away from plane wrecks and getting up to fight? Why, when they're desperately outnumbered, do they elect to do their fighting standing in a circle in the middle of an intersection? That seems like a terrible tactical choice, to me. Spoilers: A lot of plot turns seemed to be taken from other films at a predictable and eyerollable level. The heroes all arguing among themselves because of the corruptive power of the evil talisman was right out of Fellowship of the Ring. The evil army that is overwhelming the heroes until a clever scrappy (but overlookable) hero gets behind the lines and takes out the mothership, and the army collapses --- it seemed like a replay of Phantom Menace (and Return of the King and Independence Day, also.) Hey, here's a thing, and I might've whined about this before, why do these films tend to have the earth placed in an existential crisis, leaving our titular heroes to save the day, but other heroes from the same universe don't even show up. Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, X-Men --- you all have bases in or around New York City, but when a giant creepy army from space vows to obliterate mankind starting with mid-town Manhattan, you guys all sleep in.

Dennis Quaid is a randy, dimpled cajun detective on the streets of the titular New Orleans, and he's dirtier than a blown out oil rig. Ellen Barkin is a prissy DA investigating... police corruption! Can these two wayward souls somehow find love when the only thing they have in common is... a pile of dead bodies!

Whatever Rocket is eating, order me some o' 'dat. WLERAGGSCGSHOSVIPHRERHRBBSOGO/AOAVG010.4710000119.07310827[/bigpurple]1.00.119[/bigpurple]

I dunno. I don't think that walk rate is anything to break a career over.

Well, if that's not a temporary illusion, then I'm going to have to accept that our players are awesome, through and through.

Good for Familia and good for Harvey, but I'm going to guess Gwinnett isn't the class of the International League.

Yeah, this one didn't shake me up either. I think it's time for me to cash in my chips with regard to superduperguy films.

Far and Away certainly shares a few traits --- tasteful, lovely, horrible. Only that one I could smell from outside the theater and stayed away. This one, I merely should have smelled. And, of course, this one was allegedly a comedy.

My wife has taken to calling this film Titanic II, as it's not since Titanic has a film been so openly embraced by the audience around us as we've sat there flabbergasted.

It was dreadfully embarrassing. Aimed smack dab center between the eyes of AARP members, this was your cinematic alternative if you felt yourself too mature and tasteful to follow the masses to The Avengers. It's a gross insult to the mature and tasteful, even if they're too dull to notice it (more on that below). Talented if wizened actors, the colors of India, the deft and droll touch of British filmmaking. What could go wrong? Too, too much, that's what. This is the exact sort of thing that the British were good at, until they realized they were good at it. They ran out of E.M. Foster books to adapt and churned out market-driven garbage like this. Did you know Indian food gives you the shits? Funny stuff, right? Well, it knocked them dead at the elitist wealthy boomer-centered Bethesda cinema I visited this weekend. Me? I wanted to stand up and scream at them. Did you know that there's somewhere in the cinematic world where someone can respond to an announcment that somebody is gay with "You mean... like jolly?" and elicit audience laughter? I was outraged at them all. To the extent that the characters are drawn at all, Bill Nighy is a civil service retiree harried by his haradin wife, Judy Dench is supposed to be some sort of sheltered housewife who uses her widowhood to search for herself, and Maggie Smith (God bless her) is utterly humiliated as an openly racist middle-class hip-replacement candidate. (After refusing to be examined by a black doctor, she motions to him scrubbing up at the sink, and says, "'E can scrub all 'e wants, 'e's never gonna get that color off.") God help anybody who laughs at this. God help them when they ask themselves why the hell they laughed. But you know, they'll all redeem themselves, in the magic of In'ja. They all move there because their retirement funds dried up too much to afford retirement in Britain (but none of them because of the global recession, which might have, you know, spoke to one or two people). The country itself is portrayed sort of ridiculously, with their young hotel operator full of wacky Indian philosophy, an untouchable inexplicably allowed to handle food, and couples somehow unashamedly and openly make out in the streets. The religious culture of the place is referred to in passing, but always exists off-camera. What India is this? When our pretty packed house of fellow moviegoers clapped at the end, our jaws dropped. We briefly considered seeing if we could catch a late showing of Avengers to clear our palates. Get me Bill Nighy on line two. He and I need to have words.

Veteran British actors play a bunch of pensioners who retire to India. Spicy and colorful hi-jinks ensue.

Made me feel like a clueless old man trying to follow plot intricacies. Fun scene-setting establishment shots with kooky camera angles that seem to give it Brad Bird's signature. Otherwise, I take little away from it besides the corpse of a dead evening. James Bond Rule: If you have to infiltrate the home of a fabulously rich man to help save the world, he'll always be hosting a scandalously lavish black tie party that evening.

Yeah, I hope we successfully grow enough good players that these things become real issues.

He's a lefty. If he stays healthy, he'll see Queens.

On the tarmac, baby. Wings are iced and he's ready to fly. Just waiting for the green light.

Cecliani, Nieuwenhuis, Nimmo, sure. But these guys will need backups. That's real money, too! But a shattered foot and a detached retina... I know I would never be digging in with confidence again. Good luck, Seannie. See you on the front lines of the revolution.

Only 25 plate appearances. Wish he talked it over with me.

Vic Sage wrote: So... it's like every Muppet thing ever made? similar, not identical. While somewhat more self-referential than most of the movies, that self awareness was always an aspect of their shtick. And it's superior in quality to most of the later films. If you liked the TV show and the first movie, this is in that spirit, with a bit more cheek. And if you don't like the first movie, well, check for a pulse. Really, though, guys, you could have told me how bad most of the original songs were, and how whenever this baby got any momentum, a musical set piece would bring it to a screeching halt.

Smoly.

We're breeding outfielders like tribbles.

Anyhow, good story of the Outliers variety of a fascinatingly inspiring figure. He grows up in a Beatle-like situation, where yeah, the neighborhood wasn't particularly good, but the home was stable and supporting. Somehow (1) he becomes obsessed with puppeteering at a very young age and makes it through school without getting the snot beat out of him, gets taken under his wing by one of Henson's senior designers (named "Kermit," interestingly enough), and breaks into an absolutely white world with no formal theater or deign training. As one of the younger guys in his field, the art form is dying on his watch. He gets plum roles with TV shows like Captain Kangaroo and Big Blue Marble and The Giant Space Coaster before his 21st birthday, but you know, we're in the early years of computer graphics, and puppetry doesn't hold the same magic for kids that it did for him, and all three of these shows die on shift. But he's got his friends in Henson's camp, so he gets a job on "the street" --- Sesame Street, the cornerstone of the industry. But they're a family that's been together for decades, and the new guy has to take the crumbs, getting assigned fringe and experimental characters that only get a handful of forgotten appearances. This little red Grover relative puppet has been appearing, and he's performed by another guy with a horse voice and an almost vulgar crassness. The operator knows it's not working and he comes back to the shop one day, throws Elmo in Clash's lap and says "See what you can do with this." Looking for the angle to make his statement, he takes Elmo home with him, talks to him, tries different voices, and shows up Monday morning having turned him into the naif's naif --- so innocently full of love that he makes Big Bird look like a burned out cynic. He creates something bigger than himself and, as the movie tells it, everyone who met him along the way knew he would. And I guess they really did, because there's a lot of file footage, of him learning his trade as a kid, him sneaking away from his class trip to New York to visit Kermit's studio on Great Jones in the Village --- stuff like that which I can't imagine my family or friends having the presence of mind to document on Super-8 if I was a young genius. But how would I know? Anyway, Clash is really a big deal no matter how Elmo'd out you may be. My main part is what's not there. There's more about him learning puppet making than about learning performing. There's a failed marriage in there that implications suggest was stressed to the breaking point by the demands of Elmo being an international celebrity and Clash insisting on being the only performer. And you know, there's the occasionally developed but not fully addressed theme of Clash being challenged with the suggestion that this not an authentic way for a black man of today to express himself. But you spend two minutes with the man and you're going to say, "This is one authentic guy, Elmo or no."

He's all man.