no ramones, no mercy

this started life as a brief comment in an email, and quickly ballooned to rant-sized proportions so i thought it would make good blog-fodder.

i thought spiderman 3 was really good, but then again i haven't agreed with the general consensus on recent superhero movies. i thought spiderman 2 was just 'ok' except for that one scene in the operating room which was amazing, and i really didn't like batman begins much.

but in any case, yeah, i really liked spiderman 3. there were definite cheese moments, and toby maguire really can't cry and that did come close to ruining the movie. but in the end, i think sam raimi did a fairly good job of making a movie not about a superhero but about a young guy who happens to be a superhero, and the people in that guy's life.

and honestly, i think that's what's most interesting about spiderman. does anyone really care about his powers? can his one-liners (in retrospect somewhat lacking in this installment) sustain anything more than a half-hour children's show? for me, spiderman works best as a kind of teenaged version of the watchmen, albeit more of a morality play than the watchmen can allow for in its bid for complexity.

were there bits that made me cringe? oh yes. but within the context of a comic book movie, i could accept most (most) of them. and the ones i couldn't, well, whatever, they were over fast enough. and with any movie like spiderman, where I am familiar with the content before seeing it, I am definitely going to think about the choices i would have made in contrast to the director's (the only really important complaint i had was that there was just not enough queens in the movie at all :).

a lot of reviews, professional or otherwise, seem to focus on how there seems to be "too much" going on, with multiple villains and romantic subplots and whatever, but frankly I had absolutely no problem following it, and i didn't feel it lacked cohesion in any way. i recall being specifically impressed at one point with the ease with which raimi seems to be able to careen from the humorous to the tragic. furthermore, the way significant events pile up on top of each other seemed to me like a conscious decision. confluence was in a way one of this movie's major themes.

as an aside... there is a little bit of a dance sequence in the middle of this movie, and some comments i've read might lead others to believe that it is a scene out of a musical. they would be wrong. the way it is framed and shot struck me as more like a fight scene without the violence than a fred astaire number. if i had to pick one moment from a movie that was close to the dance sequence in this movie, it might be the jazz flute scene in anchorman.

and the show has reached a new low

well, john came very close in his answer to our previously featured screenshot quiz bonus round, but not quite. The first screenshot is, as John correctly answered, from Dark City, and depicts Jennifer Connelly standing at the end of a pier in the movie's final scene. The second screenshot is from Requiem for a Dream, and depicts... Jennifer Connelly standing at the end of a pier in the movie's final scene! tricksy.

And in completely unrelated post, more worthy of Graham's blog: a guy running for parliament in Finland has his campaign website available in klingon. Some have thought it is blasphemy to mix politics and Klingon. Others say it is good if politicians can laugh at themselves.

screenshot bonus round!

First, here are the solutions to the previous screenshot quiz.

1. Edward Scissorhands (this was actually my computer wallpaper at work when I was employed by Morgan Stanley).
2. Clue
3. Network
4. Stop Making Sense
5. 24 Hour Party People (the person in the photo is Howard Devoto, of The Buzzcocks and Magazine; this shot is his only appearance in the whole film).
6. Schizopolis
7. π
8. 2001: A Space Odyssey
9. The Muppets Take Manhattan
10. Radio Days
11. Rushmore
12. Being There
13. 12 Monkeys
14. Metropolis
15. Life of Brian
16. Nashville

Kudos to all three of our contestants, and kudos again to leslie who besides turning in a spectacular entry, performed a remarkable feat of filmic deduction on number 1.

And now, a SUPER BONUS ROUND. Identify the following 2 screenshots, and be sure you tell me which is which:

1. 
2. 

screenshot quiz

Hey it's time to play guess the movie from the screenshot! brought you by leslie, who's own attempt at this was really easy, so i tried to make my screenshots less than obvious. pop-up text hints! hooray! also, most of them you can enlarge by clickety-clicking.

1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 
5. 
6. 
7. 
8. 
9. 
10. 
11. 
12. 
13. 
14. 
15. 
16. 

you may say that i ain't free, but it don't worry me

Alright, let's get it right out in the open: I am a heretic.

The Godfather is one of the most revered films we have. Consistently ranked number 1 on imdb, number 3 on AFI's list of the top 100 American films, lauded by critics and audiences everywhere, the crowning achievement of the glorious age of cinema known as the 70's.

There's a better one.

Nashville is, in my mind, far and away the best movie of the 70's. It is a film with realistic human drama, deep emotions, humorous satire and beautiful music. Perhaps most importantly, it expresses a singular vision and style betraying the mind of a true director.

Robert Altman died today. I believe he was one of the greatest directors, in part because the medium of film is intrinsic to the style for which he is so well known. There is no way to make an “Altmanesque” novel or video game. The Godfather basically never seems to be more than a film adaptation of a novel, however great that novel or its adaptation is, whereas Nashville achieves a transcendence by using film in a way that is more than just another a medium for telling a story.

This should not be read as a dismissal of the achievements of The Godfather, which in many ways is the acme of the classical Hollywood style in which the filmmaking itself is so perfectly executed as to be virtually transparent. But where Francis Ford Coppola is perfecting what is for very good reason a well established film vocabulary, Altman is creating one all his own, and on top of that, actually succeeds much of the time.

I say much of the time, as even Altman's obituaries seem to go out of their way to point out that his body of work is widely viewed as being “uneven.” Did he make bad movies? Of course he did. But to think that anyone could ever achieve greatness without the risk of failure is foolishness. Over his long career, Mr. Altman had the chutzpah to achieve greatness several times over.

And let that be my lesson for today.