Speaking of Indiana Jones, here are a couple of items I meant to post a month ago but didn’t get around to:
Jul072008
Film Studies
Jul072008
Life’s Tough for an Adventurer…
You know, everybody thinks it’d be so awesome to live a life of adventure and derring-do, but have you thought about the practical considerations, the real-life inconveniences of having Nazis, commies, aliens, zombies, and indigenous tribespeople always trying to punch your timecard? Consider how your simplest daily activities would change if you really were Indiana Jones…
What a pain, eh?
Via.
Jun272008
Top 100 of the Last 25
Great, more lists. This time we’re looking at Entertainment Weekly‘s Top 100 Movies and Top 100 Books of the last 25 years. I’m not going to quibble with the actual rankings of these titles, since such things are almost entirely subjective in my opinion. My super-bestest faves aren’t likely to be yours, after all. But what I will do is follow in Jaquandor‘s footsteps and bold the titles I’ve seen or read, with occasional commentary when I have something to say.
Jun272008
Chick Flicks and Making Men Cry
There seem to have been a lot of “list memes” floating around lately, that is, lists of book or movie titles that compulsive bloggers such as myself then feel, um, compelled to comment upon. Here are a couple I recently picked up from Jaquandor and SamuraiFrog, respectively…
Jun132008
Ouch
Quote:
If M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, “The Happening,” only cost $500 to produce, was made on scratchy 16mm film and cast the late Bela Lugosi, it would be a thousand times more charming than the utter disaster it is now.
Jun122008
The First Sickness Cinema Meme
Another movie meme, again via SamuraiFrog, whose post is only one generation removed from the original source of this one. I’m not familiar with The Sickness Cinema blog, but I like their touch with a meme. So, without further ago, The First (as in inaugural) Sickness Cinema Meme:
Jun122008
Cinememe
I’ve seen an unusual number of attractive movie-related memes over the last couple of weeks, but, as you may have noticed, I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with other matters. Still, no good meme can go unmeme’d, so bear with me now as I launch into a veritable orgy of meme-ing. Or something to that effect. Basically, I’m trying to warn you that there’s a mess o’ memeage coming down the chute. But you probably gathered that already, didn’t you?
The first up is a pretty high-falutin’ one that I borrowed from SamuraiFrog. What do I mean by high-falutin’? Well, just wait until you see some of the questions and then tell me that anyone but a total film fanatic and/or snob would even know who or what they’re about. I don’t think anyone would consider me a slouch in the film-buff department, and even I had to look up quite a few of these. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot…
Jun062008
Spent My Evenings Down at the Drive-In
Briefly noted, today is the 75th anniversary of the first drive-in movie theater, which opened June 6, 1933, in Camden, New Jersey. I’ve never been a regular patron of drive-ins, but I have had a few memorable experiences at them — no, you may not ask me to elaborate on those — and of course I’m always a bleeding-heart for anything that’s both nostalgic and endangered, which drive-ins definitely are. (There are fewer than 500 left today, down from some 5,000 in their heyday.)
Wired.com has a short history of this venerable institution, and local movie critic Sean Means lists the surviving Utah examples on his blog. I recommend the Motor Vu in Erda, for what it’s worth; The Girlfriend and I spent a very pleasant evening there last summer with her family, all of whom live nearby. It’s a family-run single-screener, charmingly low-budget and down-home feeling.
One moment in particular from that night stands out: as the darkness thickens and a cool breeze begins to rise from the surrounding farmland, I notice a freight train chugging along the benches of the mountain range to the east, behind the screen. It’s far enough away that it looks like a black thread with a light at its tip, sliding along beneath the huge, projected face of Johnny Depp, the mournful cry of its horn providing counterpoint to Captain Jack Sparrow’s dire circumstances (we were seeing Pirates 3, of course; I have to say, it worked much better as drive-in fare than it did the first time we saw it in a quote-unquote real theater). That, my friends, is one of those rare moments when you start to think time travel might actually be possible, when you find yourself connected by experience to an audience that would’ve been experiencing more or less the same thing 50 years earlier. Moments like those are truly magical and all-too-rare these days.
May262008
Guys with Too Much Time on Their Hands
I’m sure you’re dying to know what I thought, so here’s the short version: I liked Crystal Skull well enough, but I didn’t love it. I had some reservations, and some things I wanted to take a couple of days to think about before I posted anything.
While you wait for the longer review — because I know everyone out there in InternetLand is waiting with bated breath for my humble opinion of a movie you’ve probably all seen by now anyway — allow me to entertain you with the following video clip, relayed to me this morning by Brian Greenberg:
People are weird…
Update: Doh! BoingBoing is reporting that this video is a viral marketing campaign from an agency that has the LucasArts games account. And as it so happens, there is an Indiana Jones LEGO game coming out in a couple of weeks to tie in with the release of Crystal Skull. So… it looks like I got taken, kids, used against my will and without my knowledge to spread the word about a product I will see no profit from myself and have no interest in helping to promote. And I have to admit, I’m feeling pretty damn annoyed about that.
In the interest of full disclosure, my own employer has been involved in creating several viral campaigns, but personally, I just don’t “get” this sort of marketing. It seems to me that there’s something sneaky about it, like you’re trying to fool people into listening to a pitch, and very often the pitch is so subtle that the commercial message doesn’t come through anyhow. If you have to really dig into the background of a video clip or a web site to find out there’s something being sold there, how can you say that your message is being effectively delivered? How many people really exert that kind of effort? And isn’t there a potential backlash against the product that’s being advertised when people do realize that that funny clip they’ve been passing around to their friends is just another freakin’ ad? I know I’d feel a little bit scammed and a hell of a lot less charitable toward Product X. Just like I’m feeling right now about freakin’ Lego video games…
May232008
Indy and Me
The funny thing is, I don’t even remember seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark when it first came out. That’s odd for me, because I can recall the circumstances and specific theaters where I saw every other major landmark film of my childhood: the Star Wars trilogy, the early Star Trek films, Superman, Tron, The Black Hole, hell, even Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. But not Raiders.