http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Thu, 29 Sep 2005 10:37:40 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/09/29/103740.php Matt MooreSerenity is a very, very satisfying movie, and that was a tough trick to pull. A movie based on a beloved (yet short-lived) TV series and written and directed by a man frequently called a genius has to be great to satisfy. I really don't think that this movie would be any good if it was merely good.On the way to the theater I expressed this fear to my wife, and she said, "Of course it will be great! It's Joss Whedon, he's a genius!" I replied, "Ever seen Alien: Resurrection?"What really stood out was the writing, of course. The characters are mostly drawn from action film archetypes (there's the amoral tough guy, the spunky woman [well, several spunky women], the conflicted leader) and they could have been cardboard flat. Instead they were all very human, reacting to situations and each other unpredictably, but always in ways that make sense. There were also lots of classic Whedon bits: extremely funny lines in the middle of intense action, emotionally crushing blows, and lifting moments of victory. Sometimes all three in the same shot.Afterwards, Zombyboy (he's got a review with links to other reviews posted here) mentioned that he saw a strong anarcho-libertarian thread running through the picture. He's absolutely right. Mal, the captain of the Serenity, fought on the losing side of a rebellion against the autocratic Alliance. Now he thinks only of himself. Well, only of himself and his crew. Well, only of himself and his crew until the good of the entire universe gets in the way. That might seem like a contradiction, how can one be an anarcho-libertarian while trying to better the whole of humanity? In fact, at one point Mal says, "The Alliance is trying to make us better, and I don't hold to that." But Mal isn't trying to make anyone better, he just wants the freedom for everyone to be better (assuming that's what they choose). And he's using the most powerful weapon he's got to fight government control.That weapon is information. One important character is a kind of hacker whose tagline is, "You can't stop the signal." It's a great summary of the power of information disseminating technology, whether it's the printing press, TV, or blogging. (It's also the title of Steve Green's review, not-so-incidentally.) The idea that a small band of individuals working together, even though they have different and sometimes conflicting motives and goals, can manage to do more for the cause of freedom than an armed rebellion is very powerful, and is the real theme of Serenity.That sounds really heavy (and boring) but trust me, the movie isn't. It's hilarious, moving, intense, and just plain wonderful. Please see it this weekend so they'll make another.(I figure I should say just one negative thing about the movie: the great theme song from the TV show was [almost] entirely missing.) Ed/Pub:NB Video37052@blogcritics.org Thu, 29 Sep 2005 10:37:40 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/12/02/104443.php Matt MooreI went into the movie theater with high hopes. Mander and Commaster (as Beth and I have been calling it since seeing a funny Letterman sketch) has been getting great reviews, and the trailers looked great. “They’ve got twice our numbahs, and twice our guns!” Russell Crowe should be the Captain in every one of the many swashbuckling epics we’re likely to see in the near future.But nothing I’ve seen about the movie quite prepared me for what I saw. The sea battles were filmed with an amazingly violent energy. It’s unbelievable to see two ships circling each other while shooting dozens of iron balls through each others’ hulls. Wood splinters, men go flying, the doctor is cutting men open while mere boys dump sand at his feet so he doesn’t slip in the pool of blood. I didn’t think about just how close these ships would be to each other during a battle; they’re only two hundred yards apart, everyone on each ship can see precisely the destruction they’re inflicting on their foe.But the movie isn’t just fast paced action, war was a much slower and more deliberate thing back then. Most of the time the crew of the Surprise could see their pursuer when it was miles and hours away, and that’s considered a sneak attack. The captain can issue orders to avoid the attack at his leisure and then have time to look at the opposing captain through his telescope. The amazing thing to me is that this kind of warfare was ever successful… the ships were out of contact with their land based superiors for months at a time, they didn’t have radar, very accurate maps, or even mechanical clocks (they were constantly using egg timers to judge their speed). How did they ever find anything to attack, and how does a navy function without any chain of command? The captain of a ship is a complete dictator as long as the ship is at sea, what happens if he goes insane or proves incompetent in some respect? Most of the crew besides the officers was drafted, and many of those are carpenters, or cooks, or from other professions that have nothing to do with water. Many can’t even swim, yet there they are, furling the sails while balancing on a rope one hundred feet above the water during a gale. It boggles the mind that empires like Britain’s could have been based almost entirely on their naval prowess.There were also several subplots about sailing, cursed crew members, and the surgeon’s interest in naturalism and biology. The movie seemed a bit long and dragged at times, but I’m not sure which of these threads I’d cut, they were all very interesting and seemed to humanize the characters. Perhaps the director meant for us to be bored for minutes at a time, it’s a realistic depiction of sea warfare in the 18th century: hours and days of boredom puncuated by short periods of sheer terror and destruction.Master and Commander is well worth the eight bucks to see it on the big screen, and I can’t wait to try it out on my Dolby 5.1 system at home. I also can’t wait to start reading Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels.Update: I meant to point out the extremely refreshing anti-French bent of this film. Of course it's about the naval battles between England and Napoleon, so I found myself yelling, "Take that, Frenchy!", throughout the movie. That really amused Beth. Video10606@blogcritics.org Tue, 2 Dec 2003 10:44:43 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/11/20/163446.php Matt MooreI’ll have to do this little review prematurely since I have yet to, and never will, watch all the extras. Just to watch the commentary tracks alone would take over twelve hours, and I don’t think I can deal with three hours on production design and makeup. So this will be about the added and extended scenes.I waited for this edition of the movie because I loved the additions to The Fellowship of the Ring. I’m not always a big fan of super long director’s cut DVDs; I really liked the fact that when the Coen Brothers did a director’s cut of Blood Simple they actually cut a few seconds out of a scene because they thought the pace was too slow. But the new scenes in this movie weren’t quite as meaningful as those in the first, a lot was just comic relief (Merry and Pippin, mostly, and they are quite funny) or endless exposition (notably a scene where Gandalf basically sums up the whole plot of the movie in one breath. Peter Jackson said something like, “Ahh, the scene where we explained it all”, in the commentary track). Of course, that’s to be expected. Editors aren’t going to leave a bunch of really expensive battle shots on the cutting room floor.That said, the new scenes did add quite a bit to the story. There’s one where Aragorn explains that he’s eighty-seven years old since all of the human kings are extremely long lived. The cool thing about the scene is that it’s played for laughs, he’s embarrased to admit his age to a woman. Another few scenes flesh out the death and burial of Theodred. They don’t give much information, but definitely add to the texture of the movie, making the culture of Rohan that much more real. And there was actually a bit of CG battle footage put back in. At the end of the battle for Helm’s Deep the orcs are retreating and run into the Fangorn, which has moved to cover the valley. The forest then comes alive and starts thrashing back and forth to the sound of orc screams. Pretty cool stuff.Is the special edition worth twenty-five bucks? I think yes, and that’s without even seeing any of the special features on the second two discs. I didn’t buy it for the features, anyway, I bought it for the extended movie. Video10307@blogcritics.org Thu, 20 Nov 2003 16:34:46 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/19/140545.php Matt MooreI saw Quentin Tarantino’s fourth film (he lets you know it’s his fourth in the credits) last night. I could have seen it on the IMAX screen, but their website didn’t detail which screenings were playing where, so we went to the earlier one. Like Gregg Easterbrook I thought this movie was disgusting, but, unlike the TMQ, I didn’t think it was morally disgusting, just visually and auditorily (a word?). Every wound seemed to be an amputation or a disembowlement, and every one of those was a firehose of blood either forced through a mister or just gushing all over the floor. One woman lost an arm, spun around spraying blood in a six foot radius, rolled around on the floor for twenty minutes, and lived.Then there were the sounds. Countless people made this crazy gurgling noise when they were stabbed, and in one scene a young female bodyguard was thrown through a table and I swear it made the sound of bowling pins crashing. The soundtrack was great, but very different (which you’d expect from the RZA, of Wu-Tang Clan fame). I describe it as blaxploitation/spaghetti western/tribal drums fusion. Other songs on the soundtrack included a Zamfir (Zamfir!) and a mimimalist Nancy Sinatra track. Course, none of us should be surprised by anything Tarantino does musically at this point.The plot is simple: Uma Thurman is the main character, known only as the Bride (her code name was the Black Mambo, but she doesn’t go by that anymore). Rather than just never give her a name, the movie bleeps out the two or three mentions of her Christian moniker. That was kinda weird, why not just be silent about it? I guess we also shouldn’t be surprised when Tarantino resorts to a gimic. But I digress...The Bride was nearly killed on her wedding day, and the eight other members of her wedding party were killed. She wakes up four years later in the coma ward of a hospital and comes into a ridiculous vehicle with Pussy Wagon written on the tailgate. She trains herself to walk, going from telling her toe to wiggle to walking in thirteen hours, and heads to Okinawa to begin getting revenge.From there it’s just non-stop knife and sword slaughter. Thurman makes a surprisingly good action hero, those long lithe limbs flying, those huge blue eyes effortlessly showing shock and anger. She doesn’t exactly look good throughout the movie, she’s usually covered in blood, but she is shot expressively, and she does a pretty good job with some wooden dialogue. I think Tarantino the writer has taken a vacation so Tarantino the director gets full use of that weird brain.Whatever else you can say about Tarantino, he can shoot a fight like no other. Most directors try to do the insanely quick cuts and end up making every scene incomprehensible. Tarantino can seemingly cut anywhere, switch to any angle, and you still know exactly where you are and what’s happening. He combines chaotic excitement with easy visual comprehension, but he doesn’t seem to be having any fun anymore. Check out his crazed, white-boy dancing in this clip from the DVD of Pulp Fiction. Can you imagine him doing that on the set of Kill Bill or Jackie Brown? I didn’t think so. Stop taking yourself so seriously, pal!Kill Bill was good but not great, and man am I glad they split it up. I don’t think I could have handled three and a half hours of this mayhem, and I know that Beth couldn’t have. Video9315@blogcritics.org Sun, 19 Oct 2003 14:05:45 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/11/175354.php Matt MooreI wasn’t at all sure what to expect from a romantic comedy made by the Coens (except that it’d be good). A classic screwball romance from the guys that brought us Raising Arizona, Blood Simple, and Fargo? You know it’s gonna be strange.I haven’t always loved George Clooney. I liked him on E.R. alright, but I thought he leaned on that persona in his early movies. You know, head down, sheepish smile... it only goes so far. But ever since Out of Sight he’s been a much more confident actor. He’s just full of charm, and he has such snap to his line readings. I truly think he’s now our Cary Grant, and I nominate him to be the next James Bond.Anyway, he’s great in this new movie, and he’s matched well by Catherine Zeta Jones. She’s another actor that started out with a promising role (The Mask of Zorro) but then didn’t really follow up on it. Now she finally does. She’s an excellent comic actress, and I can’t wait to see her in more roles like this one.The plot of the movie is simple and enticing. Clooney is Miles Massey, the best divorce lawyer in Los Angeles, and he’s representing Marilyn’s philandering, rich but indebted husband. He manages to get him out of the marriage by finding Marilyn’s Tenzing Norgay. Massey’s theory is that this divorce is Marilyn’s Mt. Everest, and for every Edmund Hillary there is a sherpa to do the heavy lifting. Well, the sherpa is found, and he’s used (to hilarious effect) to rip apart the wronged wife’s profession of love for her husband.Meanwhile Miles falls for Marilyn (of course). Can they get together? Can Miles even fall in love? You’ll have to watch to find out.The only problem I had with this movie was its length. It could have been a good thirty to forty-five minutes shorter, there was plenty that wouldn’t have been missed. No bother, even when it dragged it was fun. Video9092@blogcritics.org Sat, 11 Oct 2003 17:53:54 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/07/201612.php Matt MooreI have to say I was surprised by the great reviews this movie received. I thought it would just a stupid, enjoyable comedy, and I guess that’s what it was. But I didn’t realize that it was directed by Richard Linklater, of Before Sunrise fame. So it was a really funny and well made stupid, enjoyable comedy. Plus it had Jack Black, who is really funny but hasn’t been in a whole bunch of good movies. Sure, he had a great bit part in High Fidelity and Orange County had its moments, but other Black movies have uniformly sucked.The movie had a great supporting cast, too. I love Joan Cusack, although she was a little underused. Amy Sedaris was in the movie, too, playing (I think) a fellow teacher at the prep school, but I didn’t even recognize her. And Sarah Silverman has to be the best annoying, over-bearing girlfriend ever.But Black and the kids were the stars. Especially good were Zach, the lead guitarist, Tamika, the overweight, underconfident backup singer, and Summer, the kiss up band manager and teacher’s pet. Beth really liked the tiny little blonde girl who was a backup singer, and I thought she was cute, too.Of course I have to mention the soundtrack. It was awesome... lots of AC/DC, some Clash, and a Stevie Nicks (who I hate) song was really well used. The original number that School of Rock (the name of the band, as well as the movie) used for the battle of the bands was pretty cool, too, although it should have rocked out more on the verses.All in all, a wonderful little movie. The movie frequently made me laugh, smile, and brought a few tears to my eyes, especially the triumphant battle of the bands. Everyone will enjoy this one. Video8993@blogcritics.org Tue, 7 Oct 2003 20:16:12 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/03/204938.php Matt MooreBeth and I had a great time last night. We went to the Pretty Girls Make Graves show at the Bluebird. It was an all ages show, so we both felt really old, but other than that it was a night of smoking, PBR, and punk rock.Opening bands were S Process, who were great, and who I'd see again, and Cobra High, who were positively heinous. Beth would rather gouge out an eye than hear them again, and I have to agree. Just noise, and the lead singer's yelping was awful.Then PGMG came up, and they rocked really hard. They did a good mix of new and old stuff, probably about fifty-fifty, which is a ratio I agree with. I'd always rather hear the stuff I know and can sing along to, but I understand that bands tour to sell new records. I'll be buying the new one after what I heard.Highlights for me were More Sweet Soul, Speakers Push the Air, and some new song that had a big drum and bass break in the middle. Good thing, since the lead guitarist broke a string or something and used the time to go borrow the other guy's guitar. Luckily, that dude was playing keyboards at the time.It's weird when you first see a band and you had a preconceived notion about them. I always assumed that PGMG was a trio, and was at least half women. When they came out, I saw they had five members, and two were women. Then the second guitarist took off his hoodie and was clearly male. All the members had great energy the whole night, but they were more emo than the punk I expected. The lead singer would pantomime things, like patting her chest when she was singing about her heart beating, something you're not likely to see at a straight-edge show. At one point I'm sure she pointed at me... but the song called for pointing then, and I was the tall guy right in the middle of the balcony, so she was probably just pointing into the ether. Sigh.The closed with an encore of two songs, and beforehand the bassist asked a question that I've never heard at a concert before: "Should we play old stuff, or new stuff?" The crowd voted resoundingly for old, then he asked, "Or just covers?" I voted for covers; one of the best shows I ever saw was Trans Am when they closed with a Led Zep cover with some guy wearing a bathrobe singing the Robert Plant part.Alas, they played old stuff, but they finished with If You Hate Your Friends, You're Not Alone, which is probably my favorite PGMG song. What a great show. Music8899@blogcritics.org Fri, 3 Oct 2003 20:49:38 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/09/30/210412.php Matt MooreI really enjoyed watching The Animatrix. I especially liked the couple that showed how the Matrix came about, how the machines took over the world. I wish there had been more historical spots, especially something about the first man to figure out wh at the Matrix was. Some of the others, especially the last one, were a little too strange for my tastes. A story about woman/machine love? Yuck.Some of the more obviously CG cartoons had that usual problem that CG movies with human characters have: The machines and scenery look much more realistic than the people. Not a big deal, everything still looks cool, but it can be distra cting. Video8794@blogcritics.org Tue, 30 Sep 2003 21:04:12 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/09/28/134152.php Matt MooreThis may be the craziest movie that just might work since Being John Malkovich. Elvis and JFK (who's somehow black? Did his brain get transplanted or something?) are in a rest home and must battle an ancient mummy that sucks the life out of other residents. Bizarre, especially the scene of the two going down the hallway, evidently expecting some action, but Elvis is using a walker and JFK is in an electric wheelchair.Oh, and if all that wasn't cool enough, Bruce Campbell (of Army of Darkness fame) plays the bloated Elvis. Fucking incredible.(Link via Ryan's Rantin') Video8734@blogcritics.org Sun, 28 Sep 2003 13:41:52 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/09/25/194635.php Matt MooreI've just finished Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. This was recommended to me by Beth, who hasn't actually read it, but who heard it was good. I was a little iffy on it when I bought it; I've never been a fan of the movie version of The Wizard of Oz and I've never read the original L. Frank Baum books. Don't even get me started on The Wiz.But, that said, the book was actually quite good. I've always enjoyed books written from the viewpoint of the under represented antagonist of a classic book. My best example of this is Grendel by John Gardner, based on the bad guy in Beowulf. I've even been thinking about doing this for NaNoWriMo. Maybe the Book of Judas or something about the Queen of Hearts from the Alice books.This was one of those books that drew me right in. It covers a lot of ground: How the Wizard came to power, detailed overviews of the politics of Oz, and how the Wicked Witch of the West, named Elphaba, came to have green skin (her parents were evidently human). Amusingly, the Wicked Witch of the East was born without arms; from the movie, we had no idea what she looked like except she had legs. Plus, Elphaba (her name is drawn from the initials of her creator. L. F. B., get it?) was Glenda's roommate in college, and they were pretty good friends right up until Elphaba died.Of course she wasn't really Wicked, that was basically a rumor spread by the Wizard since she was a freedom fighter, holding back the armies of Oz from taking over the land in which she lives. She really wasn't even much of a Witch, the only magic she employs regularly is her flying broom, and she's not even sure that she enchanted it herself. The flying monkeys were developed through genetics that she learned in college and took much trial and error. We quickly learn that nearly everything in the movie was twisted to a Wizardcentric viewpoint, which built the WWotW into a horrible, all-powerful woman.The whole book was very satisfying. The characters are fully and appeallingly developed, as is the land of Oz, with everything from culture to religion to ethnic tensions written about in great detail. I think everyone that likes good, especially epic, fiction would enjoy it. Books8668@blogcritics.org Thu, 25 Sep 2003 19:46:35 EDT