Mokka mit Schlag » Movies

The Golden Compass was sold out at our local movie theater last night, which proved fortuitous since it meant we saw Juno instead. Wonderful movie! By all means, go see it. The dialog was extremely clever, even verging on Whedonesque. The basic story is about 16-year old Juno getting pregnant (after what seemed like her first time, though I don’t think that was definitively established) and then giving the baby up for adoption. I do wonder a little about a girl as intelligent and strong-willed as Juno not figuring out how to use reliable birth control, but I guess that was necessary to get the plot moving.

Of course, the movie had the obligatory, girl-goes-to-abortion-clinic-but-decides-not-to-go-through-with-it-at-the-last-minute scene. Otherwise it mostly avoided clichés. At least it didn’t go with the usual television cop-out of Juno magically discovering she wasn’t pregnant after all.

Still, just once I’d like to see a movie about a teenage girl who gets knocked up, has an abortion, and lives happily ever after, just like thousands of real teenagers do every year. (more…)

Beth and I caught Beowulf in Digital 3D this afternoon. Some other reviewers liked this version best, but personally I didn’t think it held a candle to IMAX. I also noticed that by the time the movie was over, my eyes were a little sore. Maybe the experience is better for users who don’t wear glasses. I don’t know.

It was also obvious that as good as digital animation has gotten, it still doesn’t hold a candle to real film. Beowulf was better than Final Fantasy, but still didn’t compare well to movies shot with real actors, even digital effect heavy movies like Star Wars I-III. Even more tellingly, Beowulf didn’t compare all that well to the old Harryhausen films: the monsters are better (Grendel was fabulous) but the humans are so much worse. I wonder how long it will be before we can finally render animatronic humans that are indistinguishable from real humans on the screen?

Beth and I happened to walk by the City Cinemas Village East yesterday just in time for Ratatouille (well a few minutes late, but movies never start on time anyway) so we decided to stop in. That proved to be fortuitous. Ratatouille is a wonderful movie, absolutely perfect. It didn’t hit one false note. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced it’s the best movie Pixar has ever made, and that’s saying something. It’s certainly the most adult movie they’ve ever done, despite the talking rats. Don’t worry: Ratatouille is completely appropriate for children too, but adults will enjoy this film on a whole different level.

Without giving anything away, the plot was original. Every character was fully drawn out, and a real character, never a caricature. And speaking of drawing, the animation has achieved a new level of fluidity and grace. Technically I don’t think there’s anything Pixar couldn’t achieve at this point.

I suppose Ratatouille doesn’t slap you upside the head with its originality quite as much as Toy Story did. However, you can’t hold that against it. There can only be one genre-busting original, and Pixar more-or-less invented the 3D-animated feature with Toy Story. However, with Ratatouille they’ve finally perfected it.

The only quibble I have isn’t even about the movie itself, but the previews. In the reverse of the usual situation, the previews made the movie seem a lot less interesting than it actually was. That’s a big reason I hadn’t gone to see it already. The previews made it look like just another silly animal picture, but really this movie is so much more. There’s a heart to this picture that a two-minute preview just couldn’t bring out.

If you haven’t seen it yet, go see it. You won’t be disappointed.

Some books just don’t fit into two hour movies. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix may well be one of them. Beth and I went to see it yesterday, and all the relevant plot points were there, but it had to skim over them so quickly that there really was very little heart to the movie. The characters just jumped from scene to scene.

The first two Harry Potter movies were good, mostly because they faithfully translated much shorter books onto the screen. The fourth movie was good mostly because it didn’t. By radically chopping or even eliminating various subplots, it actually produced a much tighter, more coherent story than Rowling provided in the fourth book.

The third movie, I’m not sure what happened. Despite having a reasonably sized book to adapt, it just didn’t live up to the first two movies. There was no real sense of time passing through the school year. In fact, the whole plot just sort of died. The only bit I can remember from the movie (and not the book) is Buckbeak, and not much of that. Perhaps just a bad script or directing?

The fifth movie, though, it’s obvious what happened. There was simply too much material in the 870 page novel to squeeze into a two hour movie. Unlike The Goblet of Fire, there were no extraneous sideplots that could be trimmed or cut to save time. Consequently we got a couple of minutes of Harry’s private lessons with Snape, a couple of minutes of Bellatrix LeStrange, a couple of minutes in the order’s headquarters, a couple of minutes with Hagrid’s brother, and so on. All were vastly too compressed to do justice to the scenes.
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Fowler’s Toad, Bufo woodhousii fowleri
Robert Moses State Park, 2007-07-07

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Sunday Beth and I watched Radiant City at two Boots Pioneer Theatre in Manhattan. (Short review: great movie: go see it if you have the chance, or, more likely, wait for it to show up on PBS at 3:00 one morning).

The tech left something to be desired though. The projectionist missed the cut between reels once. That could happen anywhere, but one weirder thing I noticed was that every three or four minutes, a pattern of dots that looked a little like braille would flicker briefly onto the screen. E.g. something like this:

* *
* *
*

The exact pattern seemed to vary from occurrence to occurrence, though they flashed by so fast I couldn’t be sure. The pattern seemed to consist of three or maybe four rows of one to two dots each. (I worked as a projectionist one year back in college so I’m a little more sensitive to these things than most people are.)

Is this maybe a watermark being inserted into the film to track videotaping? I’m not sure how many people noticed it, but it certainly wasn’t inobvious. I wasn’t certain I’d seen it the first time it flashed by, but once I was attuned to it, it became obvious. It does seem strange that this would show up in a small independent semi-0documentary like Radiant City though.