a heart-warming tale of magic and adventure
Fueled, as '80s featurettes would lead you to believe, by MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF COCAINE.
Took Sarah to the park downtown for a very brief meet-up with R and Sebastian and K and Lucy. Despite the fact I need to work a lot more on socializing her around other dogs, she was generally well-behaved, and enjoyed beagling along the walkways.
Accompanied K and R to dinner at Pho's Noodleville, and met up with Laura. Car conversation consisted of the Bale-maybe-joining-Depp movie news, and decided that since convention dictates that leads who start out hating each other (ought to) wind up in bed together, we need to send Michael Mann a letter alerting him to this historic opportunity he has to artistically represent this manful conflict with explicit and gratuitous male nudity and sexing. In order to assist Mr. Mann, we'll save him the trouble of storyboarding the (multiple) scenes that will be needed, and will even show up on set to help direct these scenes to achieve their full, uh, potential. Yes.
Headed to B&N after dinner, which is where my brain broke down for the night. Oh, the shame - you know those horrible people who seem to be possessed and despite all efforts to be bookstore-quiet just splorfle helplessly? I was one of the damned tonight, and fully deserved a "damn kids!" cane-shaking (there was one dude, unfortunate enough to be sitting near L & I while we paged through the Depp-graced Rolling Stone, who kept giving us the stink-eye. Sorry, dude). Must remember to return Serpent Lord! Found: some hefty castles-of-the-world tome with great pics for $9, and Susan Casey's The Devil's Teeth, about the great whites that turn up in droves every fall at the Farallon Islands.
Fled back to R's for truffles and Willow, which K had never seen before. First off, as a sprog, I watched this movie only slightly less than Star Wars/Indy, right? And I developed a terrible crush on (young and unbloated!) Val Kilmer and his long-haired quasi-Han Solo because of this and wrote endless reams of seriously godawful, highly plagiaristic copyright infringing thinly veiled fannish dreck about it. So I've got a nostalgic tender fondness for Lucasfilm's Mosesus Among the Little Folk HIGH FANTASY EPIC (which in case you didn't pick up on the HFE part, the score will beat you over the head with it).* None of that, however, means I didn't gleefully join in Team Awesome's vicious, knives-out sporking of this hilariously/entertainingly doofy, deeply mockworthy, WTF-moment-filled film about the Chosen One Who Bears the Mark of the Omen and the Smallest Person Who Changes the Course of History and the Scoundrel With the Heart of Gold, etc. etc. etc.
Behold![1] The Wilhelm Scream turns up three times.
[2]For every legitimately amusing/not-half-bad scene, there are about six of these moments.
[3] Every shot the poor child playing Willow's daughter turns up in, she has her mouth open and her tongue protruding slightly, and gives the impression of being one very dim bulb. Every shot. Unlike my evil and soulless comrades, I made no judgments on the little girl's smarts, but honestly, you think TPTB could have picked a kid actor who could deliver a line without sounding like she spent all of her time eating library paste. The kid playing her brother is an example of good child actor casting, and the fact that he was three years older than Poor Daughter probably had a lot to do with it. Incidentally, according to IMDb, Poor Daughter was not a paste-eater, went to university, and never made another movie.
[3a] Poor Daughter comes off even worse in comparison to the close-ups of baby Elora. I'm guessing wildly since the close-ups could be shot independent of everything else, it gave them more shots to pick and choose from, and so they ended up with some above-average baby-reaction shots.
[4] Costumes courtesy of the Wal-Mart craft department. My Ren Faire dress looked better than that, and it was awful.
[5] Young Val: still looks great half-naked (something Howard apparently recognized, as Val does not have a top that is closed or buttoned at any point ever in the movie, even the snowy scenes). He earns his paycheck and is a good sport about it, but I can't decide which I love more, the scenes where he would clearly rather be anywhere else, or the ones where he knows exactly what kind of ridonkulous movie he's in and goes for broke. Ha.
[6] Poor Warwick Davis. He gave it his all, and despite bravely soldiering through a movie that had not only a Lollipop Gang Village Dance, complete with jug band music, but where he had to tote around a fake baby, fight off random people in gorilla suits, and emote meaningfully while sharing the screen with a dowsing stick and a goat, he still ended up stuck in the hellhole of the Leprechaun franchise. Although, now he is Prof. Flitwick, so I guess there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
[7] There's a lot of beautiful Welsh and New Zealand countryside and some seriously nice matte backgrounds and miniatures. What can I say, I'm a scenery junkie. But has NZ ever looked bad in a movie?
[8] Bavmorda obviously never got a copy of the Evil Overlord Guide, or she would have known to just squash the Child of Prophecy at the start, instead of fussing over that elaborate death ritual that ultimately backfired.
[9] The female character Val adulterizes with at one point gets a credit listing of "The Wench."
[10] K found Tip Tipping in the stunt people credits, but alas, Dickey Beer was elsewhere.
[11] The real gem on the DVD, though, is the made-in-1988 featurette, complete with melodramatic over-serious narration, and is, with every time mustachioed Ron Howard turns up, batshit-insane and giddy and sporting hideously screamworthy '80s combover or some deeply ugly plaid thing, as good an example of Why Coke Is Bad as ever there was.
[12] If it weren't for the fact that the wheezing old compaq doesn't have enough RAM to play DVDs, I'd totally screen cap this and retell it with only pictures captioned "dude!" and "whoa!" Like so: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
*digging the hole deeper: there's a sequel trilogy. I've read it, more it than once. With the movie freshly seared into my memory, I can safely say the books are moderately less cheesy and a lot less WTFy (probably because Claremont basically reinvents the whole thing, although Amazon reviews seem to be split equally between "pretty good" and "irredeemably vile," so YMMV). And I read the movie tie-in novelization, which had a bunch of scenes cut from the movie, but I'll stop here and save what dignity I have left. Oh, that's right. NONE.
Took Sarah to the park downtown for a very brief meet-up with R and Sebastian and K and Lucy. Despite the fact I need to work a lot more on socializing her around other dogs, she was generally well-behaved, and enjoyed beagling along the walkways.
Accompanied K and R to dinner at Pho's Noodleville, and met up with Laura. Car conversation consisted of the Bale-maybe-joining-Depp movie news, and decided that since convention dictates that leads who start out hating each other (ought to) wind up in bed together, we need to send Michael Mann a letter alerting him to this historic opportunity he has to artistically represent this manful conflict with explicit and gratuitous male nudity and sexing. In order to assist Mr. Mann, we'll save him the trouble of storyboarding the (multiple) scenes that will be needed, and will even show up on set to help direct these scenes to achieve their full, uh, potential. Yes.
Headed to B&N after dinner, which is where my brain broke down for the night. Oh, the shame - you know those horrible people who seem to be possessed and despite all efforts to be bookstore-quiet just splorfle helplessly? I was one of the damned tonight, and fully deserved a "damn kids!" cane-shaking (there was one dude, unfortunate enough to be sitting near L & I while we paged through the Depp-graced Rolling Stone, who kept giving us the stink-eye. Sorry, dude). Must remember to return Serpent Lord! Found: some hefty castles-of-the-world tome with great pics for $9, and Susan Casey's The Devil's Teeth, about the great whites that turn up in droves every fall at the Farallon Islands.
Fled back to R's for truffles and Willow, which K had never seen before. First off, as a sprog, I watched this movie only slightly less than Star Wars/Indy, right? And I developed a terrible crush on (young and unbloated!) Val Kilmer and his long-haired quasi-Han Solo because of this and wrote endless reams of seriously godawful, highly plagiaristic copyright infringing thinly veiled fannish dreck about it. So I've got a nostalgic tender fondness for Lucasfilm's Mosesus Among the Little Folk HIGH FANTASY EPIC (which in case you didn't pick up on the HFE part, the score will beat you over the head with it).* None of that, however, means I didn't gleefully join in Team Awesome's vicious, knives-out sporking of this hilariously/entertainingly doofy, deeply mockworthy, WTF-moment-filled film about the Chosen One Who Bears the Mark of the Omen and the Smallest Person Who Changes the Course of History and the Scoundrel With the Heart of Gold, etc. etc. etc.
Behold![1] The Wilhelm Scream turns up three times.
[2]For every legitimately amusing/not-half-bad scene, there are about six of these moments.
[3] Every shot the poor child playing Willow's daughter turns up in, she has her mouth open and her tongue protruding slightly, and gives the impression of being one very dim bulb. Every shot. Unlike my evil and soulless comrades, I made no judgments on the little girl's smarts, but honestly, you think TPTB could have picked a kid actor who could deliver a line without sounding like she spent all of her time eating library paste. The kid playing her brother is an example of good child actor casting, and the fact that he was three years older than Poor Daughter probably had a lot to do with it. Incidentally, according to IMDb, Poor Daughter was not a paste-eater, went to university, and never made another movie.
[3a] Poor Daughter comes off even worse in comparison to the close-ups of baby Elora. I'm guessing wildly since the close-ups could be shot independent of everything else, it gave them more shots to pick and choose from, and so they ended up with some above-average baby-reaction shots.
[4] Costumes courtesy of the Wal-Mart craft department. My Ren Faire dress looked better than that, and it was awful.
[5] Young Val: still looks great half-naked (something Howard apparently recognized, as Val does not have a top that is closed or buttoned at any point ever in the movie, even the snowy scenes). He earns his paycheck and is a good sport about it, but I can't decide which I love more, the scenes where he would clearly rather be anywhere else, or the ones where he knows exactly what kind of ridonkulous movie he's in and goes for broke. Ha.
[6] Poor Warwick Davis. He gave it his all, and despite bravely soldiering through a movie that had not only a Lollipop Gang Village Dance, complete with jug band music, but where he had to tote around a fake baby, fight off random people in gorilla suits, and emote meaningfully while sharing the screen with a dowsing stick and a goat, he still ended up stuck in the hellhole of the Leprechaun franchise. Although, now he is Prof. Flitwick, so I guess there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
[7] There's a lot of beautiful Welsh and New Zealand countryside and some seriously nice matte backgrounds and miniatures. What can I say, I'm a scenery junkie. But has NZ ever looked bad in a movie?
[8] Bavmorda obviously never got a copy of the Evil Overlord Guide, or she would have known to just squash the Child of Prophecy at the start, instead of fussing over that elaborate death ritual that ultimately backfired.
[9] The female character Val adulterizes with at one point gets a credit listing of "The Wench."
[10] K found Tip Tipping in the stunt people credits, but alas, Dickey Beer was elsewhere.
[11] The real gem on the DVD, though, is the made-in-1988 featurette, complete with melodramatic over-serious narration, and is, with every time mustachioed Ron Howard turns up, batshit-insane and giddy and sporting hideously screamworthy '80s combover or some deeply ugly plaid thing, as good an example of Why Coke Is Bad as ever there was.
[12] If it weren't for the fact that the wheezing old compaq doesn't have enough RAM to play DVDs, I'd totally screen cap this and retell it with only pictures captioned "dude!" and "whoa!" Like so: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
*digging the hole deeper: there's a sequel trilogy. I've read it, more it than once. With the movie freshly seared into my memory, I can safely say the books are moderately less cheesy and a lot less WTFy (probably because Claremont basically reinvents the whole thing, although Amazon reviews seem to be split equally between "pretty good" and "irredeemably vile," so YMMV). And I read the movie tie-in novelization, which had a bunch of scenes cut from the movie, but I'll stop here and save what dignity I have left. Oh, that's right. NONE.