a scanner darkly
Last night I went to see
A Scanner Darkly, and I
loved it. I read the book a long time ago, so much so that I only vaguely remembered the plot, but a quick trip to wikipedia
cleared that up. I felt the film adaptation was true to the book, but that's based on vague memories jogged by wikipedia, so who knows. I do know that knowing the story
did not ruin the film for me at all. There were so many other good points, namely:
*
casting. I truly cannot think of any other actors better suited for these roles. Typically, I am neither a Keanu Reeves fan (despite his presence in a number of my favorite movies, go figure) nor a Woody Harrelson fan. But in this film, Keanu did what Keanu should have done, and was who Keanu should have been, so it worked. Woody Harrelson was really, really good. I think he just played himself. Robert Downey Jr., whom I normally like, was pretty spectacular. Winona Ryder, she was fine. Rory Cochrane fit in really well, and as a whole, I thought they all worked great together.
*
rotoscoping. I love good animation of all types, and I
really dig rotoscoping, especially when it's done really well—which this is. I haven't seen Linklater's
Waking Life, which is also rotoscoped, but I think it'll be in my Netflix queue soon. I don't think this movie would have been nearly as stimulating, and therefore thought-provoking, without the rotoscoping.
*
score. I don't typically buy soundtracks unless they're really, really, really super good and can be played over and over again without me ending up hating it...and I believe I'll be purchasing this one. It's a bunch of Radiohead/Thom Yorke, plus some remixes of the score by DJ Spooky and Jack Dangers. Good stuff.
Multiple thumbs up.
Labels: movies
blah blah saturday blah blah
* Thanks to everyone who left a comment on the post about The Dreadful Day of Flooring, Cats, and Cars. Nice to know my stream-of-consciousness text dump brought a little chuckle to everyone's day. My parents said it was even funnier the second time around (I told them on the phone before I wrote it all out).
* The floor is still lovely, I got my car from the dealer on Wednesday (all fixed), and my hand is almost entirely healed—I'd say 90%. I can make a fist, just my ring finger is still stiff in the joints and my thumb is still kind on puffy. Hooray for 10-day antibiotic treatments and bacitracin.
* My cats
love the floor. I'm glad they enjoy hanging out in that room, because on Tuesday the 25th they'll be spending the entire day in there as the guys take care of the living room/dining area...
* Saw
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest on Thursday with my school chums/movie buddies. I have loved that Johnny Depp since
A Nightmare on Elm Street, and I still do. He's just spectacular. I think I liked the first
PotC movie more than the second, but it was still fun. The three of us seemed to be the only ones laughing at everything—at least all the linguistic stuff. We would laugh heartily and people would turn and look at us, not laughing. Whatever. People are dumb. The "eunuch snippy-snippy" line? That was funny.
* Being godless heathens, we made wisecracks at the preview for
The Nativity Story. Well, not the first time. The first time we just said, "Huh. Ok." But we were treated to the same preview
twice. Wisecracks occurred on the second preview. Seriously. Twice? I'd rather have seen the
Transformers preview twice.
* Only five more weeks until school starts. Yay!
Labels: movies
wisdom in old movies
Last night I went with a school chum to the
beautiful old-movie-showing theatre and saw a Cary Grant flick,
The Talk of the Town. There's a scene in it when a senator comes to the summer cottage of this law prof and tells him that the president would like to appoint him to the Supreme Court.
Then, almost as an aside, the exchange goes something very much like this:
SENATOR: By the way, what party do you belong to?
LAW PROF: Oh, I belong to nether party. I vote how I feel is right, on the issue or for the person.
SENATOR: Ah, good, good! An independent voter. The
backbone of our country.
Wow. So 64 years ago it was good to be an independent, and the Supreme Court wasn't built on party lines (with particular parties having to pray that their members didn't die or have to otherwise resign so as to be replaced by scary members of the other party). Interesting.
In other news, went to a spectacular restaurant before the movie:
Lavanda. So for my Palo Alto (and surrounding area) readers, which I believe includes only myself, my boss,
Dr. Free-Ride, and
Liz Ditz, I highly recommend the place.
Labels: movies, politics
101 movies meme
Ok, here's a movie meme. It's the list of "
movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies" and for the most part I think it's a good list.
Other bloggers are bolding the ones they've seen, so I shall do the same.
Although I score pretty low on the have-seen scale, my absolute all-time favorite movie is in this list. See if you can guess which one it is (people who actually know the answer are forbidden from ruining the fun!).
"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) Stanley Kubrick
"The 400 Blows" (1959) Francois Truffaut
"8 1/2" (1963) Federico Fellini
"Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) Werner Herzog
"Alien" (1979) Ridley Scott
"All About Eve" (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
"Annie Hall" (1977) Woody Allen
"Bambi" (1942) Disney
"Battleship Potemkin" (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
"The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) William Wyler
"The Big Red One" (1980) Samuel Fuller (Seen half of it.)
"The Bicycle Thief" (1949) Vittorio De Sica
"The Big Sleep" (1946) Howard Hawks
"Blade Runner" (1982) Ridley Scott (I know, isn't it interesting/sad that I've never seen this?)
"Blowup" (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
"Blue Velvet" (1986) David Lynch
"Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) Arthur Penn
"Breathless" (1959) Jean-Luc Godard
"Bringing Up Baby" (1938) Howard Hawks
"Carrie" (1975) Brian DePalma
"Casablanca" (1942) Michael Curtiz
"Un Chien Andalou" (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
"Children of Paradise" / "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945) Marcel Carne
"Chinatown" (1974) Roman Polanski
"Citizen Kane" (1941) Orson Welles
"A Clockwork Orange" (1971) Stanley Kubrick
"The Crying Game" (1992) Neil Jordan
"The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) Robert Wise
"Days of Heaven" (1978) Terence Malick
"Dirty Harry" (1971) Don Siegel
"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972) Luis Bunuel
"Do the Right Thing" (1989) Spike Lee
"La Dolce Vita" (1960) Federico Fellini
"Double Indemnity" (1944) Billy Wilder
"Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964) Stanley Kubrick
"Duck Soup" (1933) Leo McCarey
"E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) Steven Spielberg
"Easy Rider" (1969) Dennis Hopper
"The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) Irvin Kershner
"The Exorcist" (1973) William Friedkin
"Fargo" (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
"Fight Club" (1999) David Fincher
"Frankenstein" (1931) James Whale
"The General" (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
"The Godfather," "The Godfather, Part II" (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
"Gone With the Wind" (1939) Victor Fleming
"GoodFellas" (1990) Martin Scorsese
"The Graduate" (1967) Mike Nichols
"Halloween" (1978) John Carpenter
"A Hard Day's Night" (1964) Richard Lester
"Intolerance" (1916) D.W. Griffith
"It's A Gift" (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
"It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) Frank Capra
"Jaws" (1975) Steven Spielberg
"The Lady Eve" (1941) Preston Sturges
"Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) David Lean
"M" (1931) Fritz Lang
"Mad Max 2" / "The Road Warrior" (1981) George Miller
"The Maltese Falcon" (1941) John Huston
"The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) John Frankenheimer
"Metropolis" (1926) Fritz Lang
"Modern Times" (1936) Charles Chaplin
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
"Nashville" (1975) Robert Altman
"The Night of the Hunter" (1955) Charles Laughton
"Night of the Living Dead" (1968) George Romero
"North by Northwest" (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
"Nosferatu" (1922) F.W. Murnau
"On the Waterfront" (1954) Elia Kazan
"Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968) Sergio Leone
"Out of the Past" (1947) Jacques Tournier
"Persona" (1966) Ingmar Bergman
"Pink Flamingos" (1972) John Waters (But I've seen every other John Waters film...)
"Psycho" (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
"Pulp Fiction" (1994) Quentin Tarantino
"Rashomon" (1950) Akira Kurosawa
"Rear Window" (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
"Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) Nicholas Ray
"Red River" (1948) Howard Hawks
"Repulsion" (1965) Roman Polanski
"Rules of the Game" (1939) Jean Renoir
"Scarface" (1932) Howard Hawks
"The Scarlet Empress" (1934) Josef von Sternberg
"Schindler's List" (1993) Steven Spielberg
"The Searchers" (1956) John Ford
"The Seven Samurai" (1954) Akira Kurosawa
"Singin' in the Rain" (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
"Some Like It Hot" (1959) Billy Wilder
"A Star Is Born" (1954) George Cukor
"A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) Elia Kazan
"Sunset Boulevard" (1950) Billy Wilder
"Taxi Driver" (1976) Martin Scorsese
"The Third Man" (1949) Carol Reed
"Tokyo Story" (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
"Touch of Evil" (1958) Orson Welles
"The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) John Huston
"Trouble in Paradise" (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
"Vertigo" (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
"West Side Story" (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
"The Wild Bunch" (1969) Sam Peckinpah
"The Wizard of Oz" (1939) Victor Fleming
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