Box of tarantulas
I must've spent half an hour in front of the Google movie listings on Saturday, trying to figure out which combination of movies I kinda wanted to see sounded the most appealing. I think it's safe to say we've hit a dry spell. We're on such a dry spell that I jumped at the chance to see Dear John at a screening so I could review it (and check out that review for a comment complaining about my use of a terrible swear word!!) (I have to say, the headline -- not mine -- is a lot more objectionable). We're on such a dry spell that I eventually met Marisa at 34th Street so we could go see Edge of Darkness. Rather than yet another Mel Gibson vengeance-and-martyrdom thriller, Darkness is a peculiar hybrid of hard-boiled crime movie, corporate-conspiracy thriller, and, yes, Mel Gibson vengeance-and-martyrdom thriller. It's an intriguing mixture, even though Martin Campbell (a fine action director; he made Casino Royale and the first, good Antonio Banderas Zorro picture) doesn't get it quite right. You'll get a satisfying confrontation scene with juicy William Monahan-scripted dialogue, and then you'll get kind of a boring, slow-moving scene where Gibson doesn't find out very much, or we break from his point of view to learn not very much about the bad guys. The pacing is uneven and the story doesn't add up to much, but by the end, the balance has shifted to favor the pulpier stuff, and it becomes a grim kind of fun. Like Apocalypto, it's the kind of Gibson movie you can enjoy even as it does nothing to dispell your suspicions about what a total fucking Catholic-ruined crackpot he must be.
Then we snuck into Frozen, also not bad. It's a limited-location horror movie like Open Water or Paranormal Activity, and if it doesn't summon that level of dread, it does get you tense, thinking about how you might react if you were the one stuck on a ski lift after everyone has left the resort for the week (suggested alternate title, courtesy Grandpa Simpson: I'm Cold and There Are Wolves After Me). It helps that the movie includes surprisingly decent dialogue and characterization, especially considering that those characters are relatively nondescript. It's not, you know, poetry or anything, but they actually sound like real people, not like a bad drama on The CW.
After the movies, we continued our snack-dinner at the whateverth annual February Sucks, fun as always. I'm pretty sure all the other annual events I've attended for this long of a stretch were all neighborhood parties for different holidays back in Saratoga. Actually, February Sucks/FeeBQH/Bar Hop Birthday might be the neighborhood Fourth of July/Labor Day/Christmas parties of the new millenium. Remember that it's a new millenium?!? A NEW MILLENIUM!
We did watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, but while playing Scrabble, which took me back to at least one Super Bowl I watched with Rob and Chris, I guess it must've been in high school, at my parents' house, also playing Scrabble. I missed that awesome Google commercial and caught up with it (plus the Batman version) online later. I saw most of the movie spots, which were mostly underwhelming. Actually, against all odds I dug the Shutter Island ad, because it hardly contained any lines from the movie that I came to learn after seeing the two different trailers a good 600 times each. I am so psyched for that movie to actually come out, not just because it's been too long since we've had a new Scorsese movie, and not just because the cinematography looks beautiful, but because I will never have to watch that trailer in front of a movie ever again probably.
Then we snuck into Frozen, also not bad. It's a limited-location horror movie like Open Water or Paranormal Activity, and if it doesn't summon that level of dread, it does get you tense, thinking about how you might react if you were the one stuck on a ski lift after everyone has left the resort for the week (suggested alternate title, courtesy Grandpa Simpson: I'm Cold and There Are Wolves After Me). It helps that the movie includes surprisingly decent dialogue and characterization, especially considering that those characters are relatively nondescript. It's not, you know, poetry or anything, but they actually sound like real people, not like a bad drama on The CW.
After the movies, we continued our snack-dinner at the whateverth annual February Sucks, fun as always. I'm pretty sure all the other annual events I've attended for this long of a stretch were all neighborhood parties for different holidays back in Saratoga. Actually, February Sucks/FeeBQH/Bar Hop Birthday might be the neighborhood Fourth of July/Labor Day/Christmas parties of the new millenium. Remember that it's a new millenium?!? A NEW MILLENIUM!
We did watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, but while playing Scrabble, which took me back to at least one Super Bowl I watched with Rob and Chris, I guess it must've been in high school, at my parents' house, also playing Scrabble. I missed that awesome Google commercial and caught up with it (plus the Batman version) online later. I saw most of the movie spots, which were mostly underwhelming. Actually, against all odds I dug the Shutter Island ad, because it hardly contained any lines from the movie that I came to learn after seeing the two different trailers a good 600 times each. I am so psyched for that movie to actually come out, not just because it's been too long since we've had a new Scorsese movie, and not just because the cinematography looks beautiful, but because I will never have to watch that trailer in front of a movie ever again probably.