Edgy MD

Right, Outspan. Am I really out of the loop and supposed to know that the Frames suck?

I don't know the Frames. It didn't correspond to cliches I know. It was a really minmalist script. The writer/director is Irish (checking: he's the bassist for the Frames), and it starred the Irish singer from the Frames, so brogues come with the territory. Am I really out of the loop and supposed to know that the Frames suck?

No, but it's easy to think of it as such, as the plot is more linear and the approach more hook-free than any indy movie you ever saw. It's about a guy and a girl, singing music written by that guy and that girl. Every scene is about such. It has minimal editing, and you think that's a conceit to a budget that didn't allow them to do double shots, but I don't think that's it. In one scene, the woman goes to the convenience store late at night to buy batteries, so she can play the song she just wrote lyrics to on her Discman. She walks home five blocks and the camera tracks her singing her new song every step of the way. I thought "Any production that can pull that shot off could afford the reverse angle camera, but they didn't want to." Other technical oopses were there though. At one point, I'm pretty sure saw the set lights reflected in a street window. At another, a baby in the scene reaches out to touch the camera. Also, for a film listing the sound editor as the third closing credit, the sound was pretty bad, with an audible hiss every time they started up another song. I can add more critical gobbledygook about how creativity rescued these two drowning spirits. But it's a really honest story, that you'll either appreciate or think is shite, with music you'll either appreciate or think is shite, but hopefully will appreciate the honesty. I like making music, and liked seeing a film about two interesting people making music. Plus, there's Thin Lizzy content.

The establishment of Angel's character was fun, and by reel two, you never thought of that guy as Shawn. They funny thing is that the sidekick is playing the same character, but the lead goes from (in SotD) playing an under-grownup shlub who has to leave his meatball friend behind, to (in HF) playing an over-grownup who has to learn from the meatball to loosen up. It's just too easy to make a movie about Brit dopes wishing (and not wishing) their streets had the stylized violence of Hollywood cop movies, and then steal all these shots for giggles from those movies. There seem to be a punch rule, like "We have to have something gruesome every XX minutes."

That was the trick to the Bond series. The Broccoli family owned the film rights to the characters and the book titles, but they didn't really resemble the book content. Until now, I guess.

So, I'm the only one who stumbled into this? Irish, you'll be happy to know that there's some Thin Lizzy content.

The team behind Shaun of the Dead return with this tale of an intense over-achieving cop in London, that gets transferred to a bucolic country town by his shown-up superiors. His new assignment is supposedly in a hamlet with the county's lowest crime rate. He finds the town more violent than prommised, and begins to suspect that the low crime rate is due to all their violent crimes being reported as accidents. Hijinx ensue.

Hey, enough about Hulk and Star Trek remakes. Post about some movies that have actually been filmed and released.

A country rat dreams of a more fulfilling life than scavenging for his existence, secretly longing to be a gourmet chef. When a rain torrent washes him and his colony downstream to the sewers of Paris, he finds his way to the restaurant of his culinary idol and follows that dream, baby. Follows it.

Sean Connery plays a gentleman thief going after a trainload of British gold, payday money for the British forces during the Crimean war. Lesely Ann Down and Donald Sutherland co-star. Michael Crichton, still figuring out directing after stumbling through Westworld and Coma, takes a bawdy approach to Victorian England.

A soulful Dublin guitar busker meets a Chech chich and they make beautiful music together. That's it. It's the movie without a subplot.

Nymr83 wrote: i think its hysterical that pc hollywood needs a black guy in every movie whether he fits or not, I think this is untrue and I don't think you're actually finding it to be hysterical. Nymr83 wrote: and yet you never see the "token hispanic guy" written into the film even though they make up a larger % of the american population. I guess it depends on what you think of as tokenism. I think what you're sensing is less pc and more economics. Blacks may currently be a smaller percentage of the populaiton than hispanics, but a larger percentatge of the movie-going population, Their turnout rate is even higher within the subset of action films, which is really what we're talking about. And they're certailnly a much larger percentage of the audience of English-language films. There was a rule in the mid-century comics world, that if you can give a superhero a juvenile sidekick, your sales would go up 20%, because kids like to see stand-ins for themselves in the stories. The truth is probably that adults do also.

By definition, a new medium is a departure. Some adaptations are more true than others, but the very nature of adaptations is betrayal.

The more I learn about how big the universe is, the more amazing it is that General Zog just happened to escape the phantom zone right near the planet where the son of Jor-El was exiled as the only other surviving Kryptonian.

There was a book that's worth seeking out called The Goblin Companion: A Field Guide to Goblins, that Terry Jones and Brian Froud produced as they were developing the script and design of the film. The were clearly up to something a little different as they created their pantheon, conceiving of goblin society as a direct satire of human British society. I recommend the book highly. (It was re-released as The Goblins of the Labyrinth, but go with the original if you can, as it detaches itself from the movie. That barely comes through, and the film is's not sure what it wants to be: adult satire, cute childhood fantasy, moral fable, subversive sendup, a little light vulgar humor for the 13-year-olds. Nobody toed that line better than the muppets in the The Muppet Show and the original Muppet Movie. But here they're telling adults to put aside childish things and kids to revel in them, and it gets boring watching them trying to ungarble the message. A lot of cool stuff here: the contact juggling, the showdown in an MC Escher illustration, some (but certainly not all) of Bowie's songs, but you have to sit through some things that don't work at all --- fart jokes, British dubbing, some overly cloying characters that the Muppets historically wouldn't have indulged. The wikipedia article includes a handful of characters and subplots that didn't make it into the final cut, but I didn't notice any new material in the cut I saw over the weekend. Two and a half stars out of five. One of Henson's interestingly ambitious failures from the eighties.

So I assume you gave it the one star in five. Who gave it the four?

This fantasy brought together George Lucas, Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Brian Froud, Terry Jones, David Bowie, Trevor Jones, future-Hensonian stars Kevin Clash and Brian Henson, and future-Oscar-winner Jennifer Connelly. That's a lot of talent in 1986 dollars, but it was a box office failure. It grew into a cult classic in later years and was recently re-released in 35-mm, the format in which I took it in this weekend. It's a fable with a moral that said, "Sure, it's fun to indulge in your kiddy playthings, but don't live in them as you cry about the unfair world not indulging you." The main reason to have gone back to see it, of course, was to indulge in kiddy playthings.

Wikipedia says about Kwai: The film was an international co-production between companies in the UK and the USA. It is set in Burma, but was filmed mostly near Kitulgala, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), with a few scenes shot in England.

It's the American Film Institute. The list is composed of American films.

AFI says number 24.

It seems they have the typical problem of whether to think of serials as multiple films or one. Godfather Part II is an exception.

2005. I clearly have no idea what I'm typing anymore.

There was netbuzz back in 1985 of Speilberg and Drew Barrymore co-producing a sequel, with Gertie being the heroine.

Surprise viewing last night at the Edgy household. I naturally noticed massive plot holes and technical oversights which largely made me appreciate all the more the deft and subtle wielding of a sentimental sledgehammer that obscured them the first time.

How about if had a different impact on your sister? And then you saw it three years later, and the impact on you was more profound in a different way? Birth of a Nation had the impact of helping to revive the long-dormant Ku Klux Klan. Now the impact is... different.