rebootied

I finally finished Licorice Pizza; it took me a while to warm to it. It’s fantastic, and I can feel it takes place in a neighboring headspace to Boogie Nights, definitely “of an era” in Los Angeles. 
It's not clear where it's going to end. Several times I thought it would draw to a close, end without a solid resolution, as there doesn't seem to be a real story arc to the movie. It's about the passing of time, about a specific era, and a whole bunch of stuff to which young people today probably can't relate. 

Pixar’s Coco - Moving and beautiful. I get soppy when watching family drama on airplanes, and this one really did me in. I loved it.

Justice League - fell asleep the first time I watched it, woke up at different places in the story, didn’t care that I had missed stuff. Went back after a snooze and watched the parts I missed. There’s some decent Whedonesque dialog in there, the the effects are OK except for Steppenwolf and Cavill’s missing mustachio. Ezra Miller's Flash is cute. I still like Batfleck. I will watch Gal Gadot do whatever she wants for as long as she wants. Cyborg was moody and poorly CG-animated. Boozy bro Aquamauri didn't work for me, tonally.

The Temple - I like slow burn suspense films, and I like j-horror, but this is just a lethargic mishmash of Japanese horror tropes and mid-2000s creepypasta image-editing “spoooooooky” visuals. The lack of coherence or any explanation of its goals is as complete as it is irresponsible.

The Cloverfield Paradox - Had to unplug my brain with extreme prejudice to enjoy this. It’s filled with so much “That’s not how that works. That’s not how ANY of that works!” that I was eventually able to just shut off my meager physics awareness and go with it. Chris O’Dowd was funny in it. I watched the first ⅓ without English closed-captions, and assumed they were treating Xing Ziying like Chewbacca, and that everyone’s responses were what made her Chinese utterances contextually clear to the audience. Turns out, no, they just relied on subtitles that were not automatically enabled. :lol Having an international crew who speak some Chinese to the one Chinese crewmember, despite having a Russian and a German who never speak their language natively seemed tone-deaf. Cloverfield license was tacked on clumsily, but the whole movie does everything so clumsily, it's part of its "charm."

I should also admit to seeing Daddy's Home 2, which was more of what the first one was, but fewer surprises, no weirdo side characters like Hannibal Buress and Thomas Hayden Church. I guess that was supposed to be Lithgow (underused) and Gibson (under-punished).

Lastly, The Kingsman: Golden Circle was trashed by reviews, but it's a worthy sequel to the first movie. It's nonsensical, humorous, action-packed, with an oddball villain. If NOTHING ELSE, the scenes with Elton John make the movie worth seeing. There's plenty more to enjoy though. Channing Tatum's role is practically a cameo. Part of me wonders if he wasn't supposed to be Agent Whiskey, but then had a scheduling conflict.

 I watched Deadgirl, which deserves better than the 29% Rottentomatoes it sports, but is still problematic and a difficult film to watch. I'm curious about how it can be seen as feminist horror, or even misandrist. The core message is that #notallmen is wrong (duh) because even just standing by when wrong is done, we are complicit in the consequences due to our inaction. The film goes on to show that it is, in fact, a #yesallmen scenario, because we benefit from our inaction, just reaping the rewards of systematic oppression. Which is, honestly, a big social message that I had not expected to come from a teen drama centered on zombie raping. It was pretty difficult to watch, to be honest.

I have rarely been more disappointed in a movie than Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom. I learned afterwards that it is based on a comic book, which has a significantly different art style. The movie clearly wants to be similar to a Laika film in its character depiction. The designs are very similarly proportioned, the shots' framing are sometimes similar, and the general tone is clearly aping Laika. However, I've seen Laika films, I know Laika films, and this is no Laika film. The entire movie looks like it is made from the pre-viz work that would go into a real movie. The lighting, textures, pacing, editing, etc. are all waiting for an editor to have their way with them before being passed to the people who will film the actual content.

My first thought was that it was older. We've all gone back and watched the original Toy Story and been shocked at the image quality – how it seemed amazing at the time, and now it's just weak sauce. So I figured this Frozen Kingdom maybe had been made in 2010 or 2005 – that might have explained it. – Nope, it's a 2016 film. Or at least that's when it was released… maybe the initial work was done much earlier, and it was shelved while waiting for a release?

It just feels like I got suckered in. The cast has Ron Perlman, Christopher Plummer, and Jane Curtain. It seemed like it would be a legitimate production!

It was not.

I guess in celebration of the movie coming out, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter audiobook was on sale for US$5.95 on iTunes.

...

I should have known better, I really should. To some degree, it may have been better if it had not been an audiobook. For instance, I've been looking for audiobooks read by Alan Rickman or Tim Curry. Instead, whomever was reading this book would break halfway into a "Pepperidge Farm remembers!" tone of voice for Abe whenever something had to be read in character.

But, more than that, the book makes poor use of a couple of decent ideas, either by glossing over them, or bringing them to bear too late.

I'd started off pretty excited about the movie, and now I'm not particularly hopeful there.

I watched the Watchmen, the Director's Cut even. Thanks, Weezie! Your care packages save my life. Pros:

• almost slavishly faithful to the comic, save the end -- and the end is more comprehensible than the comic's was.
  
• casting seemed spot-on for all the characters, except Owl-Dude who was good, but seemed like a handsome guy playing a dork.
• Rorschach. Wow. Perfect, start-to-finish, makes Bale's Batman look ham-fisted and overly well-armored.
• The Comedian, surprisingly. I had no empathy for the character in the comic; he's still a horrible person in this movie, but the larger sociopathic ethos makes more sense in the context of his environment. Or maybe it was just the actor. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, holy shit that guy is going to be big, if he isn't already. I am stunned to see that he was in PS: I Love You, which I watched the other day. I could -not- remember where I'd seen him previously.
  
• it made me want to re-read the comic, which I've not in ten years; the time before that was probably college, and the time before that was when it first came out in its original run of singles. Which I have somewhere. I think.
• gorgeous cinematography, almost to the point of being distracting from the story. nearly too pretty, too luscious in its grime and saturation
• um, yum, latex.
  

There are some serious shortcomings though:

• the acoustic soundtrack was weirdly noticeable and somewhat jarring, and the licensed music choices were all cliché; they were the kind of choices I'd make, sadly. All Along the Watchtower by Hendrix, Koyanisqaatsiby Philip Glass, these all speak to our own timeline, so they seemed out of place in the Watchmen '80s timeline.
• and what's with keeping the movie in the '80s? the comic was set in the modern age of its time; not updating it makes it a more accurate depiction of the comic book, but does it say anything valid about our current era, or is it only making the same statement about the '80s?
  
• The last scene at The New Frontiersman felt trite and out of place. Not the story twist, but rather the acting, in some lame mockery of Perry White and Jimmy Olsen, or J. Jonah Jameson. "It's a comic book movie! Make the newspaper editor a caricature!" Lazy shorthand, where so much of the rest of the film had some nuanced characters, even for cameos like Silhouette and the original Nite Owl
• Knot-Tops - the "samurai" gang; these felt out of place; there's no real nipponophile tendencies shown anywhere else in the movie, so these quasi-bushido gang members felt out of place. Were they in the comic? Was the Nite-Owl II and Laurie alley tussle in the comic? I felt the whole sequence was gratuitous, more so since it was clear they were looking for an excuse to get in a fight. It felt like a sequence from The Director of 300 more than a scene from an Alan Moore comic.
• the aging makeup prosthetics for Sally Jupiter and the guy playing Nixon were distractingly bad.
• the natural dangling motion of Dr. Manhattan's meat-and-two-veg was distracting, and better portrayed than ANY of his lipsynch animation.
  
• why re-work the artwork for The Black Freighter comic in that world? Why not use the original. Better yet, since the sequence isn't portrayed in the movie except for ONE SHOT, why shot it at all? What does it tell the audience who hasn't read the comic? It's an in-joke for comic geeks.

Overall, this is one of the best comic book movies out there, but it doesn't transcend its roots like the original elevated the world of comics into grown-up entertainment. This is a work for fans, and as one, I'm thankful.

D23 lures Disney fans - Entertainment News, TV News, Media - Variety:

Disney also used the confab to unveil Double Dare You as a toon production label with Guillermo del Toro to produce scarier animated pics; "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" as the title of the fourth swashbuckler in the franchise, to bow in 2011; "The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made" for the return of the Muppets on the bigscreen; and a 3-D revamp of the "Star Tours" ride.

Yesterday was Mom's Day here in Japan, so I did everything for the entire day... cooking, cleaning, looking after the kids. This was more because The Wife is still down with something that was on its way to becoming pneumonia than it was about "tee-hee, see daddy try to do what mommy usually does!" -- we have a reasonable split on household duties.
A.
Ny.
Way...

In the evening we went out to see a movie; I think we may have managed this one other time in the last year's span, but the occasions are all too rare. We decided on Burn After Reading, because she likes Clooney and Pitt, and I had heard it was a comedy.

I didn't know it was a Coen Brothers' film until the end credits, but that single fact explains SO MUCH about the movie, in retrospect. I'm a pretty big fan of the Coens, having started with a first-run viewing of Blood Simple back when I was a junior in h.s. Raising Arizona is one of my favorite films. I'm not as hung up on the Big Lebowski as many are, and I've missed the last couple of their films. Can't even name them.

This movie seems about oblique and meandering as Barton Fink. When the end is reached, there's closure, but I'm not sure what the message was. In Barton Fink, it seemed to be about entering a personal hell when one sells out personal artistic goals folar widespread recognition or money. 

The Wife and I spent an hour or so discussing the movie afterward, always a good feeling to have enjoyed a movie and thought enough during it to engender discussion, but we were really unable to come to any solid conclusion. Is it a treatise on the lack of responsibility and misplaced sense of entitlement in American culture? Is it about the danger of following through on someone else's Really Bad Plan? 

I'd like to discuss this with those of you who've seen the movie, so those who care to comment but haven't seen the movie, there will probably be spoilers galore, beware.