Reviews

Sep132009

Is It Really So Freaking Difficult?!

The Girlfriend and I passed a pleasant afternoon today watching DVDs, one of which was a little film called Fanboys. If you’ve never heard of it, don’t feel bad; I’m not sure it got a wide theatrical release, and it was probably only in the theaters that did show it for 10 minutes or so. It’s got a winning premise: set in fall of 1998, months before The Phanton Menace is due to premiere, a group of nerdy friends embark on a cross-country roadtrip to George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, where they intend to steal a work print of the movie so their buddy who has cancer can see it before he dies. Unfortunately, the execution of that premise is a little rough. While the film has a number of good sight-gags and a few knee-slapping moments, it also has some really tedious segments, and the ending isn’t nearly as poignant as it ought to be. Also, the script perpetuates some very tired stereotypes about the fanboy scene that are just this side of insulting, and there’s a really bizarre running gag about Star Wars fans being the mortal enemies of Star Trek fans. That strikes me as deeply false, the sort of rookie error made by a screenwriter who doesn’t know his subject nearly as well as he thinks he does; every bona-fide fanboy and -girl I know tends to like both franchises to one degree or another, if not equally. Fanboys is pleasant enough, but I think a movie called Free Enterprise from about 10 years ago covered the same basic territory far more effectively.

However, this entry isn’t really intended to be a movie review. It’s a rant about a very common punctuation error that I, with my proofreading superpowers, am constantly running across out there in the real world, and it drives me absolutely crazy. It turns up everywhere, even in places where you’d expect a certain command of the English language. Like, say, in movie credits. See if you can pick it out in this transcription of a line from the closing credits of Fanboys:

Special Thanks to The Skywalker Ranch and It’s Wonderful Staff

Do you see it? The apostrophe in “It’s”? Do you think whoever typed up this film’s credits really meant to say “The Skywalker Ranch and It Is Wonderful Staff”? Because that’s what it means when you put an apostrophe in between “it” and “s.” That means you’re looking at a contraction of the words “it is.” The possessive form of the word “it” is “its.” Just three letters, no apostrophe. Yes, that is a contradiction to the way nearly every possessive in the English language is formed, but, well, that’s English for you.

Let me make this easy for everyone:

  • It+s = possessive
  • It+’s = “it is”

Got it? I hope so, as there will be a quiz later. And just in case you think I’m overreacting here, just consider this:

paris hilton
see more Lol Celebs

I’m going to go take an aspirin now…

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May212009

These Are the Continuing Rants…

As previously promised — or threatened, depending on your point of view — I have more to say about that new Star Trek movie that everyone’s loving on. Before I get wound up, I’d like to reiterate again that I really did enjoy the movie, so don’t misunderstand my criticisms of it. But you know, everyone is raving about how great it was, and I, in my usual contrarian, stubborn-old-fanboy way, just can’t let that stand without argument. Because while it was better than I expected, there were a lot of not-so-great things about it.

Even though it’s been out two weeks now, I’m going to assume that spoiler protocols are still in effect for some, so exercise caution in going below the fold:

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May142009

Movie Review: Star Trek

Kirk and Spock 2.0

I’ve now seen the new Star Trek movie a couple of times, and, for what it’s worth, my opinion remains virtually unchanged from the brief comment I made the other day.

Here’s the short and spoiler-free version: J.J. Abrams’ update of the venerable sci-fi franchise is a fun and exciting summer popcorn flick that frankly surprised me (I didn’t expect to like it at all, let alone as much as I admittedly did). However, it’s also a movie with a lot of problems, both from a film-making and screenwriting perspective, and also in terms of how well it succeeds at being, well, Star Trek.

For the spoilerized and sure-to-be-incredibly-nerdy longer version, voyage below the fold…

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May272008

Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I’ve been saying all along that the only thing I really wanted from this movie was to see some old friends and find out what they’ve been up to for the last 20 years. It’s not that I had low expectations, exactly; I like to think that I had realistic expectations. I wasn’t looking for a transcendent experience, or a return to the happy days of childhood, as I was with the Star Wars prequels. I knew going into Crystal Skull that it wasn’t going to be the second coming of Raiders or even of Temple or Last Crusade; basically, I just hoped the flick wouldn’t be an embarrassing disaster.

After seeing it twice, I am happy to say that it was not a disaster. What it was, exactly, I’m still trying to figure out, so forgive me if the following is something of a ramble.

There are spoilers below the fold, so be careful if you somehow still don’t what this movie is about…

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May152008

Movie Review: Iron Man

Okay, I know I recently made a rather harsh comment about the biggest movie of the summer so far (the remark, if you weren’t paying attention, was “screw Iron Man), but of course I went to see it on opening weekend anyhow (along with, apparently, most everybody else in the country), and, as it turned out, it was a hell of a good way to kick off the summer season. If you happen to be one of the three or so people left who hasn’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it.

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Apr012008

DVD Review: Highlander: The Source

The short version: The fifth Highlander feature film, recently released directly to DVD, wasn’t as bad as I expected.

It was worse.

Much, much, much worse.

It was worse than either Star Trek V or Highlander 2, long the benchmarks for movie sequel suckage.

It was so bad it left The Girlfriend curled into a fetal ball, whimpering inconsolably.

It was so abysmally, eye-gougingly, soul-grindingly bad, in fact, that this fanboy is now finished with the whole god-forsaken franchise, at least as far as new Highlander product goes. I’m not quite incensed enough to disavow the original movie and the TV series, both of which I still enjoy, but in the highly unlikely event any further Highlander movies get made, I won’t be wasting any more of my precious, limited, mortal lifespan on them. Because when it comes right down to it, I’m just not that masochistic.

The long version follows, if you’re interested in reading any more of my rantings on this subject, but I think the important point has been made…

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Jan052008

Book Review: The Happiest Days of Our Lives

I’m not one for making New Year’s resolutions — nobody ever keeps them, and frankly I don’t need an extra dose of self-loathing because I failed to live up to some arbitrary and cliche’d promise to lose weight and improve my life — but there is one thing I’d like try to do in 2008, and that’s to get back in the habit of writing book and movie reviews here on Simple Tricks. Partly just because I used to enjoy doing them and I’ve missed it, but also because I think I need the mental exercise. My analytical skills have gotten pretty rusty the last few years, and I’m tired of feeling like a dunce when someone asks me for my opinion on something. And I think it’ll help with my retention, too; I was surprised and disheartened last night while writing my media wrap-up entries at how genuinely difficult it was to remember enough to comment on the stuff I’d read or seen only a couple of months earlier.

For my own sanity, I’m going to try and keep these reviews short. As I’ve repeatedly said, I just don’t have that much leisure time anymore, and I’m not sure people read all my really long entries anyway. Besides, there’s a real art to writing concisely, and that too is probably something I need to practice.

So, first up is a nifty work of memoir called The Happiest Days of Our Lives, by actor, writer, and all-round hoopy frood Wil Wheaton:

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Oct182007

The Disappointment… Oh, How It Burns!

My parents maintained a pretty liberal movie policy when I was growing up. Unlike a lot of Utah households, “R” movies weren’t automatically prohibited from our home simply because of their rating. Instead, my folks — well, my mom, since Dad was never much interested in movies — would do a little research and maybe a preview screening to find out exactly why the movie was rated R. Bad language was no problem, since she correctly assumed that I’d already heard every naughty word in the book (and quite a few that no one’s bothered to write down) while hanging out with my dad in the garage. Violence was likewise allowable, once I got old enough to stop having bad dreams brought on what’s now euphemistically called “intense content” by the MPAA. (For example, she flatly refused to let my uncle take me to see Alien on the big screen when it first came out — I was around nine, as I recall — but she gave her blessing for me to see it on video a couple of years later. Looking back, I think that was a wise decision. I love the flick now, but at nine… well, I probably would’ve had nightmares for years.)

Sex, however, was a little more complicated. Mom generally didn’t get upset at brief flashes of nudity or Benny Hill-style innuendo. (I guess her thinking was that if I was laughing, I couldn’t be getting too many ideas, or maybe she just liked the fact that Dad and I, who generally had so little in common, both enjoyed Benny’s hijinks.) But she became very uncomfortable with anything more, well, educational. This, of course, made such movies intensely appealing to me. However, being a good boy who always followed his mother’s wishes — i.e., a kid who was prone to fantastic bouts of guilt at the thought of “getting in trouble” — I never tried to sneak around behind her back like some kids would’ve. If Mom didn’t think I ought to see something, I didn’t see it. And that’s how I missed out on a landmark movie called Porky’s.

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Jan282007

A Final Word from 1939, and Some Thoughts

Writing a few days ago about old buildings reminded me of something I read recently. It’s yet another passage from the book 1939: The Lost World of the Fair:

Now I’ve always been fascinated with the world my parents grew up in, I mean the actual look & feel of it, because the change between that time and this seems so uncannily large, as if five centuries had passed and not five decades… I have always wanted so badly to feel what that time was like — because of a strange belief I suppose I was born with — that if, somehow, I could feel an era before I was born, the scales would fall from my eyes & and I would then be able to feel my own life, grasp what it is really like, the way you can grasp time after the fact, when it is all over…

–author David Gelernter, speaking through a fictional character’s diary in 1939

That quote doesn’t entirely capture my own reasons for being fascinated by the artifacts of the past — a big part of the appeal for me is simple aesthetics; I just plain like all that old stuff — but it does begin to get at the yearning I seem to feel when I’m around those artifacts. I really would like to experience what the world was like for my parents and grandparents, to know not just how things looked, but how they smelled and sounded, how mundane daily tasks were accomplished. I’ve always enjoyed historical stories, and stories about time travel and immortal characters, and I think that yearning to have first-hand experience of another time might be partly why.

Shifting gears a bit, I’d like to offer a few thoughts on the book I quoted above. I meant to do a proper review when I finished it a few weeks ago, but as with so many of the entries I plan to do for for this silly blog, the time slipped away from me and I never got around to it.

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