I don’t find a lot of memes out there on the ‘net anymore — apparently they were just a fad that’s now on the wane — but every once in a while, I still run across one that grabs my fancy. Here, courtesy of Tosy and Cosh, is one that grabbed my fancy this morning. It’s one of those list-style memes that asks how many Oscar-winning films — i.e., winners in the category of Best Motion Picture of their respective years — I have seen.
I didn’t watch much of the Oscars telecast last night. To be honest, I only caught about the last 20 minutes or so, with a gap in between as I drove home from The Girlfriend’s house — it’s hard to muster a lot of enthusiasm for a four-hour awards show when you haven’t seen most of the nominees. (In the Best Picture category, I’ve seen only The Departed; in Best Animated Film, only Cars; none of the foreign films or documentaries; and pretty much none of the flicks from which the various acting nominees were drawn.) Also, it was obvious two weeks ago that this would likely be one of those suspense-free years when there’s an overwhelming sense of inertia leading toward the coronation of particular nominees. Honestly, did anyone not believe that Scorsese was finally going to get his statuette? Especially when the presenters for the Best Director award were revealed to be his three most pre-eminent contemporaries and friends (Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas)?
I think I’ve mentioned before that I didn’t really care for the Matrix films. I didn’t hate them or anything — I found the first one sufficiently entertaining to warrant seeing the sequels — but I sure didn’t understand why everyone and their dogs made such a big fuss over them. They really weren’t all that smart, or they weren’t even all that crowd-pleasing, when you think about it. But my lukewarm resistance to the bullet-time bandwagon is nothing compared to the feelings of some folks out there in InternetLand. Courtesy of Byzantium’s Shores, here are 50 Reasons to Reject The Matrix. The list presupposes that you actually remember the details of the three films, which, I must admit, I do not — I couldn’t tell you who the Seraph is if you paid me — but I did recall the subjects of this priceless passage:
Reloaded Ridiculousness, 2
The machines added two new enemies for Neo in Reloaded, called the Twins. Their first priority is to blend discreetly into the simulated world of the Matrix, to walk among the people unnoticed. So of course the Matrix made them huge albino men with bleach-white dreadlocks who occasionally transform into shrieking wraiths.
“What’s that, honey?”
“Oh, nothing. It just looks like a simple Kung-Fu Swedish Rastafarian Helldemon. I’m sure there’s no need to question our fragile, sheltered grasp of ‘reality’ as we know it.”
Via SF Signal, a link to Dwight Silverman’s 15 Geek Movies to See Before You Die. Silverman is the Tech Blogger for the Houston Chronicle; see his original entry for explanations on why these particular films made the list. As usual, my own comments follow:
First thought: my geek cred is in pretty good shape, according to these criteria. I’ve seen all but two of these films (Repo Man and Dark City, although it’s been so long since I’ve seen Brazil that it probably qualifies as “never seen” as well) and I own quite a few of them on either VHS or DVD. That said, I have to say that I personally find The Matrix and 12 Monkeys both overrated and depressing as hell to watch. In the case of The Matrix, it’s that grungy, clammy look of the film that gets to me — I’ve mentioned before that I hate the look of a lot of movies that came out of the latter half of the ’90s — while 12 Monkeys depresses me because, well, it’s just a downer of a movie. I’m not a big fan of any of Terry Gilliam’s movies, to be honest. He’s a fine filmmaker, but the stories he’s drawn to rarely engage me very much, certainly not enough to warrant a second viewing. But that’s just me.
Just as interesting as what’s on this list is what’s not on the list. Any true geek is, of course, going to have Star Wars on their “must-see” list, but what about Tron? Blade Runner? Alien? 2001? THX 1138, surely the geekiest titled film of all time? Colossus: The Forbin Project, which anticipated something very like the Internet? How about The Terminator, who was controlled by an evil variant of the Internet? Or John Carpenter’s Dark Star, the climax of which is a philosophical conversation between a frazzled astronaut and an artificially intelligent nuclear bomb? The list could go on and on… and I’m just thinking of the movies of the ’70s and ’80s, when “geek culture” as we now understand it was forming. What about movies from before that halcyon period? Do any of them count? I’m just asking, here…
I haven’t mentioned it for a while, but I’ve been continuing to add to my LibraryThing catalog over the past several months. In case you’re curious, I’m now up to 1,245 (holy crap!) books entered, which comprises the bulk of my personal library. All I have left to do is a couple boxes of collectible books (the ones which live inside archival plastic sleeves and Aren’t For Reading) and a stack of children’s and young-adult books I found inside my old toy box. Obviously, this little data entry project has been a god-awful amount of work, but I don’t regret it one bit. For one thing, it’s been gratifying to get a handle on what exactly I own (when you have over 1,000 books, it’s easy to forget that you’ve got any one particular title) and fun to share that information with my Three Loyal Readers (there goes my exhibitionistic streak again!). But it’s also useful, I’ve decided, to have an inventory list stored somewhere other than in the same place where I actually keep my stuff. What good does a local inventory stored on my home PC accomplish if the house burns down and I lose everything? With LibraryThing, I have a list that I can access from anywhere and show to my insurance company in the event of a disaster.
That logic started me thinking that I really ought to set up something similar for my other valuable collections, especially my movies. A lot of googling led me DVDSpot.com, which is essentially the same thing as LibraryThing only specialized for those shiny silver discs we all love so much. I don’t like its interface quite as well as LibraryThing’s, and some of the community features that I enjoy on LT are lacking. Also, I would’ve liked to have some capability for cataloging VHS movies as well, since I still have a lot of those. But it does the DVD job well enough, and I didn’t find any online service that considered VHS. I guess a media format is well and truly dead when you can’t even find a way to inventory your legacy titles.
Anyway, cataloging my DVDs didn’t take nearly as long as my books, so without further fanfare, I now present to you Bennion’s DVDSpot catalog. I’ll put a link in the sidebar as well. Happy browsing!
Sean Means over at the Trib reports that the American Film Institute is sending out ballots to various film-industry and scholar types so it can update its list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time. Hard to believe it’s already been ten years since the first list came out… refer to yesterday’s post about the future being right around the corner and how did it get here so quickly?
In any event, this repolling is intended to take into consideration the movies made in the ten years since the original AFI list came out. Means included the nominees in his post, which I’ll now reprint here, along with this question for the reader: [Do these] movie[s] belong with the classics?
According to local film critic Sean Means, there’s a new movie coming out in May that uses the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre as a backdrop for a “romantic drama.” The MMM, if you don’t know, is the historical event that the LDS Church wishes everyone would just forget about. The short version is that in September 1857, a wagon train of settlers bound for the west coast was attacked as it passed through Utah by a group of men variously described as Paiute Indians, Mormons dressed as Indians, or a mixture of both. Most of the settlers, some 120 men, women, and older children, were killed; a handful of younger kids survived, apparently spared by the attackers. The big question that has always swirled at the heart of this incident is, was the attack carried out independently or on orders from the Church? Needless to say, it’s a touchy subject in these parts, and has given rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories involving secret Mormon vigilante groups and official cover-ups.
All of which should make for an interesting (not to mention controversial) movie. But the thing that really caught my eye was the casting of Terence Stamp as Brigham Young. Yes, that’s right, General Zod himself will be playing Brother Brigham, the most famous leader of the Mormon Church and the founder of Salt Lake City. There’s no word on whether Stamp will be crushing hands or shooting laser beams from his eyes, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he does. Because, you know, he’s Zod. It just won’t be right if he doesn’t heat-vision something…
(The title of the movie, incidentally, is September Dawn. I’ve found no official website for it, but its IMDB entry has already garnered one angry comment denouncing it as inaccurate and biased against the Church. There is no indication that the commenter has actually seen the movie in question, but then that’s how it usually goes whenever the MMM comes up. As I said, it’s a touchy subject.)
Time for some memeage, courtesy of SF Signal. This one asks you to let the world know which 2007 genre films (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, and horror) you’re looking forward to. Instructions and the list after the break…
About every six months for the last decade or so, some well-meaning acquaintance of mine has come rushing up, breathless with the news that there’s going to be a fourth Indiana Jones film. My reaction has always been something to the effect of, “I’ll believe it when I see the credits roll…”
Well, it looks like I might have to start believing. The news broke across the InterWebs a few days ago that the three men at the creative heart of the Indy franchise — George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Harrison Ford, for those who haven’t been paying attention — have finally found a script they all like and are ready to proceed. I’ve heard variants of that one before, though, so I still didn’t lend much credence to the story until I read that there’s been an official press release issued. According to it, the cameras are scheduled to roll in June of this year with a planned release date in May of ’08.
I should be enthused as all get-out for this project. After all, the Indy movies are among my top three all-time favorite entertainment properties (along with Star Wars and Star Trek, if you couldn’t guess), and they’ve all been very important to me at various points in my life. Even Temple of Doom, believe it or not. As I type this, Indy’s scruffy viasge is smiling down upon me from a framed Last Crusade one-sheet, and it is not a coincidence that in most of the photos taken of me in England 13 years ago, I’m wearing a fedora. Yes, Indy is one of my Main Men, right up there with Han Solo and Jim Kirk.
But I can’t help but think that making another movie about him is a really bad idea.
Morning, everyone. Hope you’ve all recovered from New Year’s Eve by now. I’m getting there, with some help from the kind folks at The Coffee Garden down the street. Anyway, as promised, here is a quick look back at all the books I read and movies I watched during the year just ended. If you care, that is. Personally, I’m always curious to see where my tastes, interests, and whims have led during the past twelve. Sometimes there are interesting patterns to be found, moments when I was obviously obsessing on particular ideas and didn’t realize it; other times, it’s all an exercise in randomness, and that’s frequently interesting, too. At least it is for me. If it is for you as well, read on…
For the convenience of my three loyal readers, I’ve decided to split this topic across two entries this year. First up: movies!