This trailer looks soooooo beautiful. I cannot wait for this movie. We've gone too long without a Spike Jonze film and this looks to be well worth the wait. The studio has been worried about whether or not this film will appeal to kids. I don't even think it has to. Everyone who grew up with this book will be there opening day! I gotta go find a crown.
This past Friday brought us the series finale of Battlestar Galactica. By and large I really dug it. Just the right balance of explanation and ambiguity. Though I'm sad to see it go I'm also glad that it was able to end on its' own terms rather than through cancellation.
With Battlestar gone, TV is starting to look like a scary place. For my money the only truly great shows still on the air are 30 Rock, The Office and Chuck (go NBC!). Sure there's Gossip Girl, Reaper, Heroes and Criminal Minds but I don't NEED to watch them. Gossip Girl is fun trash with no depth, Heroes stopped being great long ago, Reaper I can take or leave and Criminal Minds is a standard procedural.
The apartment my fiance and I just moved in to doesn't have TV, and even once we get a converter box and such we won't have cable or DVR. In the past this would have been a sign of impending doom. Daddy needs his stories! But with the present decline in quality television, it's not that scary of a prospect. After all, I can still get all the worthwhile stuff on Hulu.
Goodbye Television. It was fracking great while it lasted.
ROB GORDON: What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?
Rob's right. Pop music is pretty fucked up. Check out this little ditty by the Crystals from 1962:
So many songs about insane, obsessive, abusive love. No wonder so many out there find themselves remaining in destructive relationships. I would not be surprised if Ms. Rihanna were to cover this in the near future. Part of me wants to find this type of music reprehensible - but it's just so damn catchy.
Over my quarter century on this planet I've seen a good share of awesome live music. I've seen shitty bands rock and awesome bands suck. I've seen Radiohead, Lou Reed, New Order, Björk, Rufus Wainwright, Squirrel Nut Zippers, etc. In spite of all of this there is still one act left to see.
I seriously think that if Tom Waits dies before I see him live, the rest of my life will be pointless. Even the birth of my children will be a hallow experience for I shall know that they are being born into a cruel universe that denied their father the awe inspiring experience of seeing Tom Waits perform.
9 times out of 10, trash literature makes for the best cinema. It is infinitely easier to add depth to something shallow than to subtract it from something deep. In order to fit a classic work into an acceptable run time something has to give. Apparently nobody told this to the makers of Watchmen.
Though the presence of brightly colored costumes and giant squids might lead you to believe otherwise, Watchmen is a dense, dense read. Its' ideas about love, war and heroism require time to digest. But in the filmic incarnation there is simply no time to digest anything. It's the cinematic equivalent of racing through the Louvre...with fight scenes!
OK. Now I know the above statement comes off pretty harsh, but believe me this isn't a call to gang up on Zack Snyder. The sequence about Dr. Manhattan's origin as well as Rorschach's psych evaluation are both devastatingly effective. You feel his reverence for the material in every frame. You can tell that he understands the ideas that are at play. He was simply crushed under the sheer volume of them.
For years people will debate how the material might have been better served by flimmaker X,Y and Z but there's really no point. This is the movie we got so suck it up. Homeboy did as good a job as anyone could have. No filmmaker, no matter how great, would have been able to make a film that satisfied everyone (though I will admit that most anyone could have made better use of music).
Now let's put all of our petty grievances aside and unite in fear of the cinematic squid creature known as Uwe Boll who threatens to attack our collective good taste at any minute.
Though it is not exactly chic to say among the cineastes, I simply have to say:
I LOVE KEVIN SMITH
He makes me laugh. Plain and simple. So suck it.
Anyhow...
Today it was announced that Kevin is set to direct a script he did not write. It's titled A Couple of Dicks, was written by Robb & Marc Cullen and is set to star Bruce Willis & Tracy Morgan. This is big news considering Smith once declared that he would NEVER shoot somebody else's material. Also this will be Kevin's first film without longtime producer Scott Mosier.
Ever since Zack & Miri Make a Porno underperformed at the box office Smith has seriously been re-evaluating his career and this appears to be a direct manifestation of that angst. I'm really eager to see how this turns out. I have the utmost faith in Smith. Hopefully this will be the film that shows people he's not just a writer. Homeboy grew up.
FEMALE REPORTER: If you could've found out what Rosebud meant, I bet that would've explained everything.
THOMPSON: No, I don't think so; no. Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything... I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a... piece in a jigsaw puzzle... a missing piece.
According to Peter Bogdanovich, Welles' unreleased final film: The Other Side of the Wind, might finally get screened at this May's Cannes Film Festival! Mind you they've been making similar statements for years, but something tells me that it might finally be Orson's year. We will finally get to see/hear Welles' final statement as a filmmaker (dramatic pause) His cinematic rosebud.
This past Friday brought us the series finale of Battlestar Galactica. By and large I really dug it. Just the right balance of explanation and ambiguity. Though I'm sad to see it go I'm also glad that it was able to end on its' own terms rather than through cancellation. 
ROB GORDON: What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?
9 times out of 10, trash literature makes for the best cinema. It is infinitely easier to add depth to something shallow than to subtract it from something deep. In order to fit a classic work into an acceptable run time something has to give. Apparently nobody told this to the makers of Watchmen.
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