Last movie you watched

[Celedam]

X-Men: First Class

It wasn't bad, but having been a total nerd for the comics back in the day — from the late '70s, thanks to back issues, through the early '90s — I cannot overlook the liberties they take with established characters and their backstories. Same problem with X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It's pure cognitive dissonance.

Oddly, the Avengers movies (Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America) have been much more faithful to the comics, and thus easier for me to enjoy.

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The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Remarkably faithful to the book, as the last two movies were, but being faithful this time means having the same episodic, island-hopping story. Good for kids with short attention spans, not so much for adult fans.

Unfortunately, the one big change they made to give the movie an overall story arc ends up short-circuiting the surprise of the Island Where Dreams Come True. That scene in the book — when the crew realizes exactly what it means and how they've been duped — is excellent. In the movie, on the other hand, it's the climactic battle for which they've been preparing all along. Feh.

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Conan O'Brien Can't Stop

Conan is just too normal and nice to be a nexus for drama, so they really had to stretch to find a narrative for this documentary: "Fortysomething workaholic goes on national tour, gradually becomes exhausted and a bit short-tempered." Hell, if I started something like that, I'd be ripping off heads by the end of the second week. For diehard fans only.

[erilaz]

The Seduction of a Nerd a.k.a. Mother a.k.a. Up Your Teddy Bear (1970) -- An absurd and largely tedious film, but the cast is amazing: Wally Cox (the voice of TV's Underdog), Victor Buono (King Tut from the campy 1960s Batman TV series), and an assortment of hot babes in various degrees of undress, topped by the glorious JULIE NEWMAR as the tough but super-sexy CEO of a toy company.

Source Code (2011) -- An entertaining sci-fi thriller that kept me interested from beginning to end. I'm really enjoying Zowie Bowie's directorial oeuvre so far.

[Bakajo Nono]

Ooh, I liked Source Code.

[erilaz]

At the San Francisco Documentary Festival:

Jason Mecier Does Amy Sedaris -- San Francisco-based artist Jason Mecier creates mosaic portraits of pop culture icons using somewhat unconventional media. Back in the '90s, he mainly used pasta, beans, etc. (I would kill for his macaroni-art Charlie's Angels triptych). Nowadays his thing is to have celebrities send him some of their own junk, which he uses to create portraits of them. In this short film, we see Mecier going through his process, portraying Amy Sedaris using scraps left over from her arts-and-crafts book.

Unlikely Treasures -- A very entertaining 52-minute documentary about members of my own tribe: people who have a compulsion to collect stuff: not the sorts of things that will necessarily appreciate in value (or even have any monetary value at all), but all sorts of random objects. We see a man with hundreds of old LPs of kitschy Québécois music, a woman with a collection of copper jello molds, a guy who collects cookbooks with the word "meat" in the title, a woman with a passion for old staplers, and so on and so forth.

[Bakajo Nono]

This Film Is Not Yet Rated - Good documentary about the MPAA rating system.
We Live in Public - Uh, just, wow.

[Celedam]

The Invention of Lying

An interesting premise undermined partly by Gervais' well-worn style of humor but even more by what I assume was a studio directive to stick to the standard rom-com formula. I know Gervais can cut more deeply and deliver a more satisfying pay-off; the Christmas specials / series finales for both The Office and Extras had me cheering out loud. But this was so bland, and not just because the premise required it.

I wonder what Stephen Merchant would have brought to it, if he'd been a co-writer and not just a cameo appearance…

[erilaz]

John Rabe (2009) -- Rabe was the director of the Siemens factory in Nanking, China, in the mid-1930s. Even though he was a Nazi, he played a key role in saving many thousands of Chinese from slaughter at the hands of the Japanese invaders during the Rape of Nanking in December 1937.

[Celedam]

The Golden Compass

The book was mediocre. The movie is worse. Never mind the writer's infamous anti-Church perspective. (I won't call it anti-religion because it's not, although the writer apparently doesn't know the difference.) The entire story is just poorly constructed — even for a genre like children's fantasy adventure, in which you can get away with a lot of nonsense — and compressing all of the problems of the book into a two-hour movie makes them that much more obvious. Too many characters (further compounded by the presence of the dæmons), too many factions, too many locations, and too many set pieces, all mashed together without any sense of proper world-building. In other words, it's exactly what you'd expect from a militant atheist who almost flunked out of Oxford and doesn't know a thing about storytelling but still thinks he's clever enough to single-handedly tear down the legacy of C.S. Lewis.

On the bright side, the movie is faithful to the book and it's technically well produced, so… yeah.

P.S.: You may think I'm giving a bad review simply because I disagree with the writer's politics, but in fact I agree with him on many issues. Bad storytelling is what it is, however, and winning lots of awards from other intellectuals and atheists who already agree with you doesn't make your bad story good. (Hint: If the story was good, then the politics wouldn't be so obvious.)

[erilaz]

The Wrath of the Gods (1914) and The Dragon Painter (1919), two early features starring Sessue Hayakawa, who was a major star during the silent era and went on to play the commandant of the P.O.W. camp in The Bridge on the River Kwai.

[boinsie]

Watched Army of Darkness for the first time in years tonight. Oh my god, did my childhood come haunting back. I swear my older brother must have quotes half of that movie all the time. Gah, so good in its campy ridiculousness.