Stray Hawkeye

I’m not entirely sure why, but it strikes me that The Big Lebowski and The Catcher in the Rye have a fair amount in common.  I can’t exactly put my finger on what it is, and I may be off as its been several years since I last read The Catcher in the Rye.  Sort of a wandering, semi-aimless main character / protagonist who is easy to relate to, but not necessarily look up to.  He’s both profoundly self assured and entirely shake-able.  Quirky and largely driven by impulse and outside influences.  A certain reoccurring metaphorical theme around falling or feeling like you’re falling.  Brushes with the sex industry and art/artists.  Unfulfilling / odd sexual encounter, include ones centered around a certain voyeurism and also one night stands.  An attempt at denying or avoiding responsibility for the majority of the piece, but ultimately sort of accepting it, but mostly meditating on it.  Questions about identity and the inability to correctly identify it and phonies both real and perceived.  Being beaten and left curled on the floor by a stranger.  A conflict between the real and ideal worlds that the character imagines himself in.  Lots of religious overtones that are never really directly addressed.  Lots of profanity, to the degree that it occasionally seems purposely excessive.  And as much as all of that, the fact that I really like them both, but always end them feeling like I didn’t totally get it.  Like there’s something I missed, or that even though I pretty much know what it’s about, I can’t really put my finger on it or explain it.

Kevin Smith (Silent Bob and director of Mallrats, Clerks, Dogma, etc) being entertaining and talking about a potential Superman movie.  Amusing and some good insight into how Hollywood movies get made, or not made (language is NSFW, video’s not that entertaining visually so if you just want to listen to the audio you won’t miss much):

And a bit more recent clip that really changes my view of Twilight fans, though not my guess of how bad the movie is (also language NSFW), first bit’s the best (via An Amber-Colored Life):

The news last night had this amusing clip of a cat climbing on a police officer while he was issuing a speeding ticket:

I started laughing really hard about half way through, when he keeps going with writing the ticket, because it made me think of this bit from Super Troopers (despite the warning, this is one of the most clean parts of the movie):

“Do you need some help with that cat, sir?”  “You just stay in the car, meow.”

A while ago I went to a performance by the Minnesota Orchestra where they showed an old Charlie Chaplin movie, and played the score to the movie as it went. (Side note- the Minnesota Orchestra is doing it again with another Chaplin movie in early January.  I’d recommend it.  It’s fun.)

It was really cool not only because it was a live performance coupled with a great movie (City Lights is awesome, highly recommended), but because it’s also the way silent movies were originally shown – with a live musician either performing the score along with it (often on just a piano), or completely improving a score for the movie as it played.

I also remember that at some point even longer ago, I saw something on TV about old movies, and I believe one of them was a Charlie Chaplin one as well, where they were saying that it’s a bit hard to restore a definitive version of the movie, because it was originally produced with 4 different scores, any one of which could be played with the film, and each one of which had a very different tone and style, each giving the whole movie a very different feel.

So, here’s my idea for the more cinematic crowd out there. I’d like to see a website called Four Score (intentional pun on Lincoln’s speech) where a film maker produces a modern silent movie, and then releases it to the website. Any user (or possibly a select group of preselected composers, up to you) can then submit a score / sound track for the movie in the form of an mp3 to be played along with the movie. The best four are voted on, and the 4 different versions of the movie are then released on the site. I would tend to imagine this would work best with shorts, maybe in the 5-10 minute range, just so people would be willing to watch the different versions, and so the idea of coming up with a score for them would be at least somewhat within reach of the average user.

I have no idea where I found this originally, and I haven’t been able to find where it originated to give credit, but I like it and thought I’d share.  Pretty impressive for a black and white animated gif.  Note – you may have to refresh the page or click on it to get it to start from the beginning.

Anyone know where it came from?

Previous Savage Chickens praise here.  More recent favorites:

• Inglorious chickens
• Rawr
• Moondays
• Sell it
• And…. quite possibly the hardest I’ve laughed at a comic in months -  here.

Abridged scripts from the editing room are great 2-3 pages versions of popular movies.  And by abridged, I mostly mean 2-3 pages that narrate the plot and key scenes of the movie, while making TOTAL CRAP out of the MOVIE, while using STANDARD SCRIPT FORMATTING.

They’re pretty funny, especially for ones you’ve seen- most of them are mocking enough that you need to actually have seen the movie for them to make sense.  The Dark Knight is a pretty good one, though I’m not sure why they feel the need to make fun of Maggie Gyllenhaal, I think she’s kind of cute.

It’s rare that a movie is so profoundly terrible that the reviews panning it can be so good, but apparently the new Transformers movie takes awful to a new level.  After reading the review, I kind of almost want to go see it to see if it is actually that bad, because it sounds impressive.  If so, perhaps the government could step in to help these GM models as well, after all, we can’t have our American movie characters failing.

I can just see the trailer for the third movie now – Transformers 3: Rise of the Honda:

Yeah, it’s not quite as intimidating, but I hear it gets twice the gas mileage, lasts forever, and has great resale value.

Review via Boing Boing.

I’m entertained. I love the hammer bit. And it would seem there’s more that a little bit in there for the ladies as well.

Somehow, even after reading several of the Sherlock Holmes stories lately, I always pictured Holmes as being notably older. Like in his late fifties or sixties. Not sure where I got that from.

So perhaps this is really just one of life’s minor annoyances, but still, it bugs me.  Do you ever go to a movie in the theater, and then, when the movie’s over, you’re not sure if you should leave, or if there is some great little snippet after the final credits that’s way better than the entire rest of the movie?  And then you sit there for 10 minutes while the names of the 6th Key Grip, the Person Who Rented a Car for the Producer in Toronto One Time When He Was Drunk, and The Guy Who Made These Stupid Credits So Long (unfortunately, without his address listed) scroll by.  And then… nothing.  You sat around for 10 minutes waiting for a clip for nothing, and as you walk out of the theater the guy coming down from the projection room gives you this funny look for sticking around through all the credits when there is obviously nothing after them.  And then, the next time you go to see a movie you leave right after the movie so you don’t feel like an idiot again, only to hear there was this great scene after the credits of the movie you walked out on.

No more.  No more I say!

MovieStinger.com keeps a list of which movies (including new releases) have extra clips (stingers) after the credits.  There’s a search box on the right hand side, down a little ways if you’re looking for a specific movie.  You can also submit if a movie you saw had a stinger or not to help grow the site.

Some old, awesome pictures from the sets of Godzilla movies:

link: http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/er/2008/05/godzilla-may-19.html

link: http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/er/2008/04/new-category-go.html

More here, here, and (*ahem*) here.

Also, and ongoing list of Godzilla related posts on that blog here.

So I saw a poster up outside the movie theater for House Bunny, which looks like a full frontal tactical assault on the intelligence of anyone who dare watch it. This is the poster:

Does that mixture of a purely vacant expression, with the excess makeup/photoshoppedness cause anyone else’s first impression be to a double take accompanied by the thought “Wait, is that a giant poster of an animatronic blow up doll’s head?”

So, I have heard of the game/tradition of watching the Big Lebowski and drinking a White Russian every time the Dude does (and tired it on a couple of occasions, which is why I have a hard time remembering a lot of the plot/details of the later portions of the movie, but can still tell you it is quite good, odd, but quite good).  I’ve also heard of smoking a joint every time the Dude does (not really my speed, at all, so I can’t tell you how that one would go, but I would imagine similar results).

However, from watching this clip, I would like to propose a new game/tradition: drink every time a particular explicative, in its various forms, is uttered over the course of the film.

Anyone care to test drive this new game with me?  After all the political coverage I’ve been watching lately, I could use a drink.

As a side note, in making this post, I also came across one of the more just unexpected Wikipedia articles I think I’ve ever seen (beating out the previous most random Wikipedia article of the list of problems solve by MacGyver)- A list of films that most frequently use the word “fuck”.  Apparently The Big Lebowski only clocks in at #21, right between Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and Pulp Fiction.

In the theme of my earlier post on a review of The Happening, here is another good panning of a terrible movie I hope never to see.  This one is particularly good for its thoughts on what a good version of this movie could have been.  My favorite bits:

For a brief, hopeful moment, I thought the filmmakers might be making a point about how the contemporary compulsion to record the world has dulled us to actual lived experience, including the suffering of others — you know, something about the simulacrum syndrome in the post-Godzilla age at the intersection of the camera eye with the narcissistic “I.” Certainly this straw-grasping seemed the most charitable way to explain characters whose lack of personality (“This is crazy, dude!”) is matched only by their incomprehensible stupidity. Smart as Tater Tots and just as differentiated, Rob and his ragtag crew behave like people who have never watched a monster movie…

and

Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.

Does anyone else remember the 80’s movie Real Genius?  Well, looks like the military finally caught up to Hollywood:

http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/dn14520-us-boasts-of-laser-weapons-plausible-deniability.htm

Excuse me while I go stock up on popcorn.