Movie trailers

We've lamented before that movie trailers were not generally made available for legal embed. But I see Avatar's is, and I hope this means a shift in the industry.


Official Avatar Movie

Into Temptation OR Little girls with holes in their tights always make me cry

I'm looking through our list of posts and I see several that I started to write but didn't finish.  Such is my life.  But here's one I'll finish because now it's timely for the holidays.

We recently (now a couple months ago) saw Into Temptation. (City Page review here.) I knew nothing about it when it started, and then was surprised to see the Minneapolis skyline and lots of other Minneapolis settings, many within a couple miles of our house.

Apparently, it's a relatively low-budget indie movie filmed here. It may not make it to a theater near you. It's the story of a Catholic priest (Jeremy Sisto) trying to find a mystery woman (Kristen Chenowith) who confessed to him that she intends to kill herself. She's a prostitute, so his search for her takes him to places (Sexworld -- yes, an actual place) and into contact with people he doesn't typically come into contact with.

It's a positive, realistic portrayal of a priest, so maybe it's worth seeing for the rarity of that.

I don't want to spoil the ending, but I can say that it reminded me of something I witnessed at a work holiday party a decade ago. I told K the story after the movie and apparently I still can't tell the story without crying.

My workplace then -- we'll call it AATDEA for Ad Agency That Doesn't Exist Anymore -- invited employees' families to attend the holiday party. (This was a response to the drunken debauchery of the previous year's party that was sans families.) One of AATDEA's employees was the maintenance guy who had a 6 year old daughter.  The agency didn't pay him much and he was going through a divorce, struggling to pay a lawyer to help him with custody.  His daughter came to the party in an everyday sort of cotton dress and well-worn shoes, with a plastic barrette in her hair and holes in her tights.

Another employee's 6-year old daughter was also there, dressed to the nines: velvet dress, lacy tights, satin ribbon in her hair, new black patent leather shoes.  She looked expensive.

As part of the activities at the party for the kids, there was a story reader.  Kids gathered around, sitting on the floor in front of the reader so they could see the book's pictures when the reader showed them.  There were already many kids seated when Expensive Girl and Torn Tights Girl joined the group.  Expensive Girl walked to the front of the group and plopped down.  Kids behind her had to adjust their spots so they could see around her.  Torn Tights Girl followed Expensive Girl into the group and sat down next to her in front, but as she sat down she turned around to make sure she wasn't blocking anyone's view.  She melted my heart.

I'm wondering if the person who made Into Temptation was at the same Christmas party.

I hope life is going OK for Torn Tights Girl.  I think, though, that life tends to be harder for girls who had to go to their parents' Christmas parties in torn tights.

Poster for 2012

Update II: removed the fake Brian May tweet.

The title of the song is Time for Miracles and Adam is mentioned on the movie poster (at the bottom).

Inglourious Basterds

I liked it. Richly imagined. I'm always tickled when someone WRITES SOMETHING, and Tarantino did. It's WWII depicted as a bit of a western. Brad Pitt was a problem for me; I was distracted by how hard he was working at maintaining some sort of Southern accent, but K was not bothered. Christoph Walz on the other hand is worth the price of admission. I only had to close my eyes for a few brief spells.

District 9 OR Mmmmm, Cat Food

The older I get, the less I'm able to watch violence. This was unbearable for me.

First drafts of movie lines: moves out of Twitter

Someone else got interested in the first-drafts-of-movie-lines meme and put some energy into blogging about the phenom with stats and graphs and a day-by-day accounting of it. This person also set up a web site to capture lines and allow voting (which seems like the next necessary step).

More first drafts

of movie lines:

With Apologies to Meryl Streep

It wasn't a dingo.

"A serpent ate my Bindi."

H/t: Hot Air

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Caught this last weekend at an early showing. Early showing was important because this is a very, very long movie. The first couple of hours were slow. Very slow. Did I say that it was slow? Whether or not I liked it or thought it was good was overshadowed by how many times I looked at my watch. Another example - I normally never leave the theater during a movie. If I need a bathroom break, I just wait. I'm always afraid I'll miss something. I didn't have that problem here. I was extremely confident that no matter how long it took me to get there and back, I wasn't really going to miss anything. And I didn't.

OK - enough about the length. I, along with those sitting near us, found it humorous that this film was based upon a short story (sorry, I couldn't help myself). I'm not a big Brad Pitt fan, so I wasn't expecting much from him. So I guess he delivered. My impression is that he followed what has become a trend in Hollywood lately to get yourself either (1) overweight and/or (2) in not very attractive make-up and presto, Oscar nomination. Charlize Theron, Kate Winslet, Robert Downey Jr, etc. The story was semi-interesting, but only near the end for me as Pitt had to become younger. And the relationship he had with his love interest as their ages converged gave the movie whatever pop for me it could. Both C and I were underwhelmed and surprised that it was nominated, but then again, it fit the formula that Hollywood loves to promote. If this wins anything major, I will be surprised and disappointed.

The Reader

This is a Best Picture nominee, which also includes my favorite actress - Kate Winslet. I read the book many years ago, so I knew the plot and I was curious to see how the film would work in Ralph Fiennes. My recall of his character in the book was that it was somewhat small, yet in the movie, he is much more prominent than Kate. In fact, Fiennes character as a young boy has more screen time than she does. I've read that many in the film industry feel as if this was more of a supporting role for Winslet and she should have been nominated for Best Actress for "Revolutionary Road" (which C and I will be seeing this weekend). The movie itself is a tad slow and while the performances were all good, I came away feeling that the movie itself wasn't. That being said, Winslet was very good in this. She really shows her skill because she doesn't have all that many lines of dialogue - she does most of her acting with looks, with expressions, with body language. You read all the time about how many women have negative feelings about their bodies - you can tell from her words and roles that she doesn't. It's obvious that she is very much in tune with her body, so she has the freedom to use it (use all of it) to express inner emotions and feelings through it. She really is at the top of her game right now, which for her is saying something.

An interesting side-note to this film is that the movie couldn't start production until the young man that is Winslet's love interest turned 18, due to the sex scenes and frontal nudity (for both of them). I think this is the year that Kate finally wins a Oscar - one that she should have won years ago. I just hope she doesn't blubber and studder during her speech pretending to be shocked and not have prepared anything. Please....she has been picking up awards for the last couple of months, so she has to have an idea that she MIGHT win.

LJ's Best Picture Film Festival

I've been, correctly I must say, called out for not blogging lately about my Oscar nominated film festival. In my defense, I've been spending most of my "free time" trying to get through the final season of The Soprano's, doing our 2008 tax return, and researching/planning a vacation C and I are taking in early April. However, I should be able to find time to follow through on this.....

Several weeks ago, C and I saw "Doubt". This isn't one of the Best Picture nominees, but we wanted to see this because of the 2 leads (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep) and to see if someone who is in only 1 scene of a movie could be good enough to get an Oscar nomination (Viola Davis - Best Supporting Actress). This film is adapted from a play and it did have a play-ish feel to it. The story was really good and the acting was very good and while Viola Davis was in only 1 scene (actually, technically 2), the scene(s) was an important one and she WAS great in it. Amy Adams has also been nominated for Best Supporting Actress in this and while she has more scenes, she didn't stand out at all to me. I'm sure that anyone who went to a Catholic school in the 50's - 60's had some serious flashbacks, especially in relation to Streeps' character. In the end, the audience has just as many "doubts" as Streep does, from the main question of the plot, but also of faith, of justifications, of styles, of just about everything. This movie does what I think most good/great films should do - giving you ample ammunition for discussions and conversations hours after seeing it.

And because it is the subject of Today in History

in that thing over on the right. Gallipoli was one of my favorite movies of my misspent youth.

Water for Elephants

This was a book club pick. It's a novel set partly in a traveling circus in 1930 and partly in a nursing home circa 2000. I particularly enjoyed the details about life in a traveling circus. The plot is a little cheesy, a little trite, and the writing is mediocre, but it's constructed well, with an ending revelation that I hadn't guessed. Seems like it would make a good movie. (I just Googled and I see it may be headed for the screen.) It borrows from Fried Green Tomatoes with its elderly nursing home patient telling a story of his younger years, the theme of creating family with non-blood relatives, use of trains/railroad as a key component of the plot, race (FGT) or class (WFE) issues, mentally-ill abusive husband, and an end revelation about a murder.

The novel highlights an interesting bit of trivia about Prohibition. Jamaican Ginger Extract ("Jake") was a medicine that was 70-80% ethyl alcohol and so was used as a beverage by some during Prohibition. To prevent people from drinking it for non-medicinal purposes, the U.S. Treasury Dept decreed that it had to be altered with ginger solids that made it bitter. Supplies of Jake were occassionally tested by the Dept. of Agriculture to make sure the ginger was present. Amateur chemists found a way to make Jake without the ginger, but with another chemical addition that tricked the ginger tests. As it turned out, their additive was a neurotoxin that caused partial paralysis. It is believed to have left thousands or tens of thousands of people partially paralyzed, typically with a characteristic odd gait ("Jake leg"). More details on Wikipedia here.

In an afterword, the author, Sara Gruen, describes a professional battle between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse that took an elephant as a victim (and a spoiler alert if you're paying attention):

In 1903, an elephant named Topsy killed her trainer after he fed her a lit cigarette. Most circus elephants at the time were forgiven a killing or two -- as long as they didn't kill a [townsperson] -- but this was Topsy's third strike. Topsy's owners at Coney Island's Luna Park decided to turn her execution into a public spectacle, but the announcement that they were going to hang her met with uproar -- after all, wasn't hanging a cruel and unusual punishment? Ever resourceful, Topsy's owners contracted Thomas Edison. For years, Edison had been "proving" the dangers of rival George Westinghouse's alternating current by publicly electrocuting stray dogs and cats, along with the occasional horse or cow -- but nothing as ambitious as an elephant. He accepted the challenge. Because the electric chair had replaced the gallows as New York's official method of execution, the protests stopped.

Accounts differ [as to whether cyanide-laced carrots were also involved], but what is not disputed is that Edison brought a movie camera, had Topsy strapped into copper-lined sandals, and shot sixty-six hundred volts through her in front of fifteen hundred [soulless, depraved, horrible] spectators, killing her in about ten seconds. Edison, convinced that this feat discredited alternating current, went on to show the film to audiences across the country.