#1,408: 1408

I'm actually up to 1417 by now, but 1408 was a milestone.  The next title / count sync point is 1492, I think. On the screen:

• Sleuth - thumbs up.  Twisty and turny.  Not entirely sure about that last one though.
• Videodrome - Didn't like it very much.  I'm pretty sure Robocop addresses the issues here better.
• Fast, Cheap & Out of Control - Didn't like it very much.  May have deserved more careful viewing, but I didn't find any individual story or the connections between them that interesting,
• Surf's Up - Didn't like it very much.  3D modeling of water has gotten pretty good though.  If you're going to do a mock-doc, have the courage of your convictions and stick to the format, I say.
• American Teen - Didn't like it very much.  You took cameras into a school and discovered...the stereotyped characters every program about high school shows us?  Great.  Thanks.  The speculation on whether it was faked is supposed to get people talking, I guess, but why cast doubt on something even less remarkable if it -was- scripted?
• Snuff - Didn't like it very much.  Pretty much exactly the sensationalist fluff they decry in other films they excerpt.
• Pathology - Didn't like it very much.  Wanted to, since it was written by the guys behind Crank.  Nice for gore fans maybe.  Awfully low stakes for so much murderin'.
• Time Crimes - Done well enough, but contains just about the minimum amount of story one can tell in a time travelin' tale.  Should've been a short.  The stuff people say about plot holes is garbage though.  There were no other decisions to make.
• Monster Camp - I think it's hard to cover this kind of material and be fair to the people in it.  Contained a topic I'm hearing a lot about lately that I haven't heard of very often before: the D&D nerd who fails out of school. Would have benefited from a little time spent showing people enjoy themselves....unless the message was nobody does.  Hm.
• Friday the 13th Part 2 - In which the retcon fest begins.  Jason has lived and aged and started murdering.  Just because.
• The Gamers 2 - Better than expected, although at first I was expecting another D&D-styled doc.  Low budget project actual dramatizes a game of D&D fairly effectively, and represents the in-game world at least as well as the official D&D movie.
• Taken - Representing the 'take EVERYTHING from them' genre, the cool thing here is that Liam Neeson can't even be bothered to actually take everything from the people he hunts.  He's so single-minded in his task it's not even truly a revenge story.  A good use of the hip and mod realism in the field of fighting styles - almost no knock down drag out 5-10 minute battles.  If he's going to keep things moving he's going to incapacitate the baddies fast and professional-like.
• The Ruins - A good, fun horror in the man vs. nature category.  Trapped on a pyramid with plants that want to eat you?  It's not going to go very well.  Not well at all!
• Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium - Wonder is the key word in that title.  I do like exposition into a formed world and movies that sustain that world throughout.  The plotting is minimal, so as not to get in the way of all that Wonder and Magic going on everywhere, and that's just fine by me.  Full of neat ideas brought to life, like the congreve cube.
• Coraline - The best iteration of the Neil Gaiman movie so far.  The 3D was good, although at times it seemed like the frame-rate dropped.  Maybe the whole thing was a slightly slower rate that only showed in moments of high-speed?  Not sure.  Tried to win an auction for a jumping circus mouse, but it ended thousands of dollars more than I wanted to spend.
• Friday the 13th 12 / The Remake - lazy, shoddy work.  This was not a movie that should have tried the realism trick.  I -know- it's hard to tag a movie like this for nonsensical or unrealistic content, but it's in the same sense that magorium works that this doesn't.  It's not about our reality vs. the movie's, it's about the movie being internally consistent.  There were loads of goofy continuity-type glitches, but the problem that breaks the movie is not deciding what to do with Jason.  Is he a clever and military-minded guy who digs tunnels and rigs traps, or the traditional deformed, retarded man-child that can't tell his mother from this installment's heroine?  Is he a force of nature or a guy that needs floodlights to hunt his prey? And where exactly does he keep drawing weapons from, anyway? The other plot point that seemed really odd was Trent getting mad at girlfriend Jenna for befriending another dude who looks just like him, but neither of them having any problem with Trent having sex with their pal Bree (whom the other guys in the group know well enough to join on vacation, but find too intimidating to talk to).  Silliness abounds with lighting, water depths, orchestra hits, but for some reason not the kills, which are presumably why someone checks out a movie like this.  I didn't expect greatness from the group making this movie, but what a mess.
• 1408 - Much better than the trailer suggested.  And much less to do with Cusack's kid than one might have thought.  Sam Jackson has a fun role.
• The Daily Show - Watching weeks at a time on the Hulu, I have to say I was disappointed in Jon Stewart's interview with Jimmy Carter.  Sure, he doesn't have to be in the hard-hitting news business, or spend the whole time talking about the book Carter was promoting, but I was very disappointed to see so much of their time spent covering exactly the same nonsense they bashed the 24-hour-news channels for covering a few days before.  Bad form.

And in print:

• High School Undercover - Better than the recent, similar documentary, American Teen, but still not especially good. Mainly covers the boring bits of school with some drugs and sex thrown in to pique prurient interests. All the caution used to protect identities (characters formed from chunked and pressed actual student sweepings!) makes it tough to invest in anyone. The chapter done up like Van Sant's Elephant (students' lives intersecting, various events seen through a variety of viewpoints) should have been fun, not a chore. From bookmooch it was delivered, and back unto bookmooch shall it return!

Over in life, the radio program marches on, with another 5 or 6 scenes written in this week to be recorded next week, and a few more would-be writers invited to participate. They, of course, declined. 

I auditioned for a UCB house harold team, expected nothing, and got nothing.  I'm pretty sure I'm just fine with that. Especially because...

...I'm starting a night job with a new SpikeTV program next week.  Glad, in fact, that I didn't have to choose between what would be a substantial amount of pay for me and comedic advancement.

Oh, and I'm not sure if I like it, but I guess I'm a part of this facebook thing now, whatever THAT means.  The chart that draws lines between people I've met who know each other is kind of neat, I guess.  It seems kind of too spread out and inconvenient though.  I've been monkeying with it because it's a new toy, but it kind of feels the same as that World of Warcraft demo, in that it's designed to keep you logged in and wasting time for someone else's gain.  There's consistently a lot to do, but not much of it seems worthwhile.

#1,398: Passengers

I'm glad that an actor as good as Andre Braugher makes money acting in studio movies. It's too bad he doesn't get quality roles lately though. Rise of the Silver Surfer, The Andromeda Strain, Passengers... The Mist was closest to passable, I guess.

• Find Me Guilty - Lumet. Thumbs up. Uncharacteristically good role for Mr. Diesel.

• Before the Devil Knows You're Dead - Lumet. Thumbs up. Not as good though. Some of the efforts to be twisty seemed to be overdoing it.

• If I See Randy Again, Do You Want Me To Hit Him With The Axe? - Not great, but worth watching to add such a fine title to my list.

• Daughter - Not very scary, not very short scary short film. I suspect the creator of employing fake symbolism to appeal to professors, and since it got his career rolling, I guess it worked.

• Dear Zachary - a doc from the prestigious MSNBC films. Topped a number of 2008 best lists, so I went in knowing nothing about the content of the movie. Always a good strategy; I recommend the same to you. Thumbs up.

• JCVD - Another one I recommend that you view in the same manner I did. In this case, that's bookended by 20 trailers from other JCVD movies and followed by one of his goofiest 90s flicks. Turns out the guy can do some acting, and the audience cheered at all the right parts. I'd like to see it again some time in fact. Thumbs up!

• Hulk Vs. - ...Thor was a lot better than ...Wolverine, which seemed to be animated to the quality standards of fan art. (Which they rub in by showing classic comic panels of each character at the end.) The Thor segment tells a story worthy of a saturday morning cartoon. The Wolverine segment pushes caricatures of some of the most deadly x-men characters around the screen, all carefully not harming one another. Omega Red has never seemed less scary. Thumbs down!

• The Beach - Not at all what I was expecting, which was something more Cast Away-ish. Very kinda okay, like lots of Boyle movies. Does Leonardo DiCaprio ever play a different character? He seems to turn up as the same guy an awful lot.

• Oktapodi - One of this year's Oscar nominees for animated short. Pretty good, but I'll tell you, not entirely realistic.

• Passengers - This movie finds a bush and then beats all around it for many hours. I wish I'd looked at the clock to make a note, but scanning back through the movie I'd say the 'Answer' (it's that sort of movie) occurred to me around 20 minutes in. And then, after another week or so of running time, they actually spent a full 10 minutes (no exaggeration) doing that 30-second flashback you usually get in these kind of movies that shows you all the clues we saw earlier, now in the light of the Answer's big reveal. I suspect that if you've got that much explaining to do, you might not have actually told a story with your interminable pile of scenes that came before. I like Anne Hathaway, but I kind of felt sorry for her each time her attempts to do acting smashed into the brick wall of a male lead again and again. (Here's hoping he doesn't drag down Watchmen too.) Despite a 4-second cameo by W. B. Davis, aka C.G.B. Spender, aka the Cigarette-Smoking-Man, thumbs down.

• Medal of Honor: Airborne - on the 360. In much the same way that coin-operated arcade games don't seem so long when you don't have to keep dropping quarters to continue playing, the single player 'campaign' mode of this game is around 5-6 hours of FPS gaming stretched double or triple through the saddling mechanism of the 360 controller. It's not a bad game, and you see all the battles one might expect whenever one fights World War II. This is a leftover from my suspiciously-good deal on a 360 console and games.

• 24 - For the first 6 hours of the new season, I'm enjoying the show. I liked how this year's conceit started out as Jack in the real world. The real world people are baffled by Jack's decisions, and the threats of the 24 supervillains. Jack's super powers don't seem to work on anyone except those villains, although he does seem to be able to infect real world people he meets, bringing them into the fold. For example, the FBI agent who finds his methods deplorable...until she gets a taste of them in action, and half an hour later, her previous moral compass has been thrown to the magnetic wolves. I think we did blatantly see a series of events from one perspective and then another though, and that the producers were telling us that 'real time' may not be as important anymore when the scientist kidnapped in the first 5 minutes of the season had managed to assemble the insanely powerful and useful technological macguffin in less than ten minutes.

On the topic of Improving My LA Experience, I may have found a solution to the unemployment thing, which seems to plaguing ever more folks around me every day; I'm pondering new living arrangements; I've dropped an improv group that wasn't working out so well for me; and I'm still working on Better Radio. This is taking longer than expected, as usual, between recasting, failed recording attempts, slow post production, and a difficulty in corralling a staff into one place and time. But every day, some new piece of the ten-episode puzzle falls into place. Today's piece of that puzzle? A fresh segment submission from that glittering jewel in the Italian crown, Z-Rob!

#1,388: 21

WATCHED a lent copy of Foxy Brown this week. Fun and crazy and interesting to see where the different standards used to be. READ a copy of How to Cheat your Friends at Poker, presumably by J.D. Richards. I'm inclined to believe that Penn Jillette really did help someone else get their text into print on his good name, because Penn's never so dull in anything else he works on. Pretty much like reading a bound up handful of old BBS-era textfiles describing how to be a successful cheat with all the usefulness of Steve Martin's advice on how to get a million dollars and never pay taxes. Don't know that I really wanted someone to train me at cheating in a game I don't play, but I wanted more than I got.

WATCHED 21, the Los Vegas advertisement that looked kind of neat in the commercials. I talked with some of the dealers about the movie last time I was there. They said if anything, it was pretty good for the town, since it got more people in thinking they could work the system the movie didn't actually explain to them.

But I was still surprised by how bad the movie was.

While it ran, I had a litany of complaints, but I thought writing them as it played was corny, and now, minutes after the film ended, it almost completely escapes me. The cheesy 80s score, the paper-thin plot twists, the just enough romantic subplot to fill in a spot in the trailer, the reams of voiceover material that tells us how great vegas is. I guess they just didn't sell the fantasy of winning a lot of money, since, like poker chips, it didn't seem like money. They don't use it for anything, and they don't seem to have really worked for or earned it, so there's no reason to care when things go south for the characters, as they inevitably must in order to fulfill the plot formula. There was one fun moment when one character took everything from another character, but that didn't last.

ALSO, this week I saw a bunch of Robot Chicken, which really loses its fun when it isn't fresh; the Rifftrax Live short 'Self Conscious Guy,' which was good; the start of season 3 of the excellent UK series Hustle, and I synced up the last segment of 2001 with Pink Floyd's 'Echoes,' which is like doing Wizard of Oz + Dark Side of the Moon in that it's kind of neat, but doesn't really work any more than how most songs will seem to fit most videos.

OH, and I cranked through most of the Google Reader I'd been ignoring for 3 or 4 weeks. Sweet Christmas I wish people proofread their posts. It's like the /film people are using a speech recognition program, for how often they get simple words and homonyms wrong. Also, even though nobody should have to be told this, if you're a journalist, or even if you're just pretending to be one on your blog, the fact that you're writing the story IS NOT the lead, least of all on your first day on the job. Unless maybe you're 9. Or 93. Yuck.

Yet more movie stuff

Since I've been talking movies lately, here're my advance picks for 2009: I think these are the most likely to be good and do well:  Up in the Air, The Road, Shutter Island, Thirst, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, Up, Public Enemies, Inglourious Basterds, Brothers Bloom, Avatar

I'd like to like these, they've got good things going for them or at least an interesting logline, but most of them also have worrying, possibly movie-ruining elements: Where the Wild Things are, The Wolfman, Shorts, Sunshine Cleaning, Surrogates, Terminator Salvation, Men Who Stare at Goats, Monsters v. Aliens, New York I Love You, Powder Blue, He's Just Not That Into You (that's three movies in a row on the interlocking story template of Love Actually and Crash, which automatically makes me hope they'll be good), Pandorum, Princess and the Frog (c'mon disney!), Push, Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (c'mon Gilliam!), The Informant, The International, Jennifer's Body, Julie and Julia, Lonely Maiden, Lovely Bones (That's like 7 in a row I have higher-than-average doubts about), The Fighter, Fighting, Game, Cirque du Freak, Cold Souls, Coraline (even though no other Gaiman movie has turned out well), The Countess, Crank 2, Daybreakers, District 9, Drag Me To Hell (Raimi + Lohman), Edge of Darkness, Escapist, The Boat that Rocked, Bad Lieutenant, Knowing (two with nic cage, with hopefully mitigating elements), Assassination of a High School President, Adoration.

They Probably Ruined These, but they sound like they could have been good, once upon a time: Return to Witch Mountain, Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, State of Play, Ninja Assassin, Notorious (this doesn't look anything like the original), Pink Panther 2, Inkheart, Killshot, Leaves of Grass, The Lodger, Friday the 13th, Creation, Christmas Carol, Duplicity, The Box, Astro Boy, 9, Dorian Grey

No Thanks: Wolverine, Soloist, Stepfather, Street Fighter, Taking Woodstock, Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, Tooth Fairy, Transformers 2, Moon, New Moon, Obsessed, Possession, Old Dogs, Ice Age 3, I Love You Man,  Kickass, Land of the Lost, Last House on the Left, Fame, Fanboys, Fast and Furious, Final Destination 4, Funny People, G-Force, Ghost of Girlfriends Past, GI Joe, H2, Harry Potter 6, Donkey Punch, Dragonball, Bruno, Bright Star, Bride Wars, Away We Go, Angels and Demons, Amelia, Agora, Adventureland, 2012, 17 Again, Night at the Museum 2, Nine

That's 50 hopefuls to 62 doubtfuls.  Pretty darn optimistic of me, since I can barely recommend ten releases from 2008.

But if I did have to pick ten that I saw, they might well be: Wall-E, Wrestler, Keith, Iron Man, Dark Knight, Cloverfield, City of Ember, Burn After Reading, Bolt, and Sharks in Venice.  

I haven't yet seen the following 2008s that I've heard were good, and some may well break into the previous list: Let the Right One In, Timecrimes, Man on Wire, Counterfeiters, Dear Zachary, Appaloosa, In Bruges, Zach & Miri, Boy A, AMONG OTHERS.

They weren't the best, but I also liked: Be Kind Rewind, Indiana Jones 4, Quantum of Solace, Kung Fu Panda, Seven Pounds, and Vantage Point.

The 10 Worst Movies of the Year that I saw include: 7 dreadful things: The Happening, Wanted, Love Guru, Jumper, Eagle Eye, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Blindness, and the nowhere near as bad but still disappointing Tropic Thunder, Clone Wars, and The Bank Job

#1,386: Disturbia

Movie roundup:

• Zero Day - Z-Rob Day? More authentic feeling than Elephant, funny, and then of course the inevitable happens.

• Idiocracy - Mostly didn't like it as much as I heard I should, excepting some of the jokes built around following a line of logic through to an extreme, like "the electrolytes (re: salt) plants crave!"

• Slumdog Millionaire - Also less awesome than advertised. Until the (spoiler!) FULL CAST DANCE NUMBER kicks in! Woo!

• Blindness - In which we learn that blind people are worthless. But still not as worthless as women.

• Death Wish II - In which we learn how darn rapey LA is. Or hopefully, was.

• Twilight Zone: The Movie - This movie takes 4 episodes of the classic TV show and makes them boring. It's almost as if this movie was made in....The Twilight Zone! (ps, thank heavens I haven't seen any Twilight-zone puns having to do with that vampire nonsense that went around lately)

• The Golden Compass - In which we learn about how repulsive those filthy Egyptians are! Actually, this wasn't too bad, but it didn't always seem to be made for the kid audience it was presumably chasing. Also has one of the to-be-continuedest endings ever; too bad they won't be making the other two. That CG polar bear will never get his bottle of delicious coca-cola.

• Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane - Way better than Snakes on a Plane, hands down.

• Diary of the Dead - Liked it. Wonder if it was supposed to take place on the same day as 'Night of,' or if the Romero series isn't necessarily a continuous chronicle of the same outbreak. There's audio re-used from the 'Dawn of' remake, so maybe it fits in that timeline instead.

• Out Cold - The secret to happiness is low expectations, so I liked this better than, say, co-star Zach Galifinakis suggested I might.

• Bulletproof - This action movie parody starring Adam Sandler is played so straight I'll bet a bunch of viewers didn't even notice it was a comedy.

• Over Her Dead Body - It's Ghost Town except with a girl seeing a ghost girl and dating her dude, instead of a dude seeing a ghost dude and dating his girl.

• Sharks in Venice - Has sharks. Has Venice. Has some other stuff the makers half-remembered from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Ah, Venice!

• Death Wish V: The Face of Death - Pretty confusing, since I haven't seen DW3 or DW4 yet. Between the lack of rape, the lack of plot-irrespective architecture scenes, and the more creative kills, it practically didn't feel like a Death Wish at all.

• Seven Pounds - The more puzzling opening section of this was the most fun. Some nice little touches that weren't explicitly called out, even through the more formulaic second half. Liked it, not sure it would work.

• Strictly Sexual - Two girls hire two guys to be live-in whores. Naturally, love ensues.

• Disturbia - Rear Window. Explains too much. Better than the Reeve remake, I think. Probably one of Ben Savage Shia LeBoeuf's best roles, but that's not saying much.

Looks like only 6 or 8 for 17. Pretty mediocre lineup lately.