Here’s the 1982 trailer for ET:

MovieLine posted the trailer to support the wisdom of Super 8’s decision not to give away too much ahead of time. But, wow, does the ET trailer seem dated! It feels like it has about half as many scenes as a typical modern trailer. Contemporary trailers are much more coherent, not in the sense of making sense (which they usually don’t), but in the sense of feeling like a whole experience, usually ending with an ear-ripping blast or, after you’ve thought it ended, a shocking image or wry remark. I hate contemporary trailers because they are assaultive and disrespect the movies they spoil, but the ET trailer seems excepionally poorly made.

Maybe they figured (correctly) that they really just had to tell us that it’s the next Spielberg film, and that ET was unlikely to bite children in half.

1 Comment »

At the risk of becoming just slightly obsessed with the awfulness of Airport 1975, here’s the honest-to-grid trailer for it, indistinguishable from parodies of it:

Simply for purposes of comparison (SPOILER: better cast, better acting, even funnier):

1 Comment »

A couple of days ago while waiting my turn in the shower, I snapped on CNN, quickly got fed up with what can only be called drivel, and spun the dial. I landed on what I at first thought was Airplane! but,which after a cognitive twitch came into focus as that upon which the parody was based: Airport 1975.

This morning I went through the same drill, but this time I landed at the final fifteen minutes of Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado about Nothing.

Fortune has, I believed, paired up for me two movies that meet the rigorous formal requirements for the relationship Could Not Be More Different Than.

Airplane 1975 is the one with Linda Blair faithfully waiting for a kidney, lying next to Helen Reddy who is an honest-to-jeebus singing nun. It’s the one where Karen Black accepts the garland for Worst Performance Ever by playing the stewardess-behind-the-wheel with such passivity that you want Sister Helen to come into the cockpit and slap her once, real hard. It’s the one where Charlton Heston descends from a helicopter through the hole in the airplane to save the incompetent female, and then tells her to calm the passengers with the eternal bard-llke phrase: “Go, do your thing,”

On the other hand, in the fifteen minutes of Much Ado, I laughed hard, cried harder, and hugged my wife at the end.

I’m sure there are other pairings, and I’m curious what they might be, but none can surpass the More-Different-Than-ness of Airport 1975 and Much Ado about Nothing.

1 Comment »

Silestone — ‘Above Everything Else’.

By Alex Roman. Completely computer-generated. More here.

Be the first to comment »

Last night I watched two things on TV.

First, I caught up with some of The Onion’s news clips. One was a report about a video game — “Close Range — that consists of nothing but shooting people in the face. Although the “news” item wasn’t The Onion at its hilarious best, it was at least brief.

Then we watched Oliver Stone’s “W.”

When will I learn? Stone continues to be the worst major director of his generation. Perhaps we can quantify this by saying that he’s the worst Academy Award-winning director in my lifetime. That’s not to say that everything about every movie he makes is awful. But it doesn’t matter, for all of those good moments put together are washed away by the mighty river of awfulness that goes by the name of “Alexander” [My review and followup]. So, yes, “W” has some ok moments. Well, actually it doesn’t. It has a good vocal impersonation of Bush, and the humorous revelation that Richard Dreyfuss actually sort of looks like Cheney. But otherwise it’s made out of 100% cliche and cardboard. It also has two more of Stone’s signature qualities: It goes on too long (it should have stopped when Bush wins the presidency) and it uses embarrassingly failed tropes that Stone thinks are arty. (In “W,” he cuts to Bush alone in a baseball field, as if in a dream. Or something.)

My conclusion: The four minutes parody news report from The Onion, of average quality, is far superior to all of Oliver Stone’s work put together. Especially if you were to put all that Stonage together and actually watch it.

PS: The Onion lets you play “Close Range” for free.

[Tags: movies tv the_onion oliver_stone reviews fps games ]

Be the first to comment »

Video games have gotten one rev away from awesome. While the graphics on PC games are not yet truly photo-realistic, they are good enough that, in the hands of superb graphic artists, they are not only immersive, they are stylistically interesting. Bioshock is a terrific example of this. Far Cry 2 is realistic enough that you want to pull over and watch the scenery now and then. The new Call of Duty is visually good enough that killing Nazi and Japanese soldiers was too gruesome. The human figure, facial expressions, and even dirt and dust are getting very close to being good enough for drama.

So, here’s the movie I’d like to see using these tools. It’s a drama, possibly a mystery. Multiple narrative threads and interdependencies. All set within a single city, or in sites that I can teleport between (unless travel becomes more rewarding than it is in most games). I want the characters to enact the plot. And I want to be free to wander around the city, eavesdropping. I want to be a ghost, a disembodied eye and set of ears, a camera, moving around the room where characters are now interacting, choosing where to look and who to listen to. The first time through, I’m not going to be in the right spots at the right time. Eventually, though — and perhaps with some guidance from the plot or extrinsically (“Go here now!” arrows) if necessary — I will see and hear everything, and I will understand what happened.

I don’t want to interact. I don’t want to choose my own ending or help characters find the key or move the crate. I want to watch a movie, but be completely free to move through its settings as I want. And, perhaps the software will let me record the movie as I’ve seen it, and share my path with others.

I wouldn’t know how to write a movie like this. Maybe it can’t be done in a way that makes for a satisfactory experience. But I’m curious. I’d like to see one. [Tags: movies video_games theater art narrative ]

12 Comments »

If spoilers were as incompetently directed and edited as Quantum of Solace:

Kwantom of Solars begins with this bigg car chase where it luks like a heliokopter is going to smash into a tunnel, but it turns out that the haliockropter is rally just where the camera is. Anyways, Jammes Bond lives at the end of the caar chase. Oh, but first there’s this carr chaise where three carrs are all the same, even the colorr is the same because they’re black, and they’re filmed like all quick and everything. So, one of the carz is going real fast, and another car is oh and there’s a truck, but it’s all smudgy in the shooting, so another carr or maybe the first carr is shooting at the second smudge and then the first smduge, no wait, it was the second no wait it was the third, well, no then the third smudge would be shooting at itself, anyway the blurry one is now the traffic is going the other way and there’s a truck and two of the smudges are clunking up against one and other, and wait one of them probully has Jumms Bornd in it and twank twank you here the zounds of them bullits twanking and it’s really exxciting what harppened?

[Tags: movies james_bond quantum_of_solace spoilers marc_forster incompetent_directors humor ]

4 Comments »

Scott Kirsner has posted his ten favorite worst predictions about the movies, drawn from his just-published book. My favorite of his favorite: Jack Valenti’s. (I missed Scott on Science Friday…)

[Tags: movies scott_kirsner ]

Be the first to comment »

Saw it last night. It was that or its polar opposite: That ABBA movie.

It left me oddly unsatisfied — odd given its virtues — the way professional wrestling does. The plot has no natural momentum, which is disappointing given that it was written by the folks who brought us Memento and The Prestige, two movies driven by strong plot ideas and ornate, wonderful plotting. Instead, it seems to be a movie written by The Joker, the principle of chaos. So, you’re left with booms, beatings, and a dark mood. It kept my attention without actually being entertaining, and I came out feeling worse than when I went in.

I also came out with two questions:

1. I found the car chase (ok, so now I spoiled it; there’s a car chase) hard to follow. It wasn’t the worse of the shaky-cam extravaganzas we’ve seen in the past few years, but it was bad enough. Shaky-cam editing has become so common that I’m beginning to think it’s my problem, not the director’s. Maybe I’m just too old to keep up with the rapid, blurry editing. Is it just me?

2. If you saw The Dark Knight, were you also bothered by the implicit endorsement of torture as a morally acceptable (i.e., Batman’s) way of getting information when dealing with terrorists?

NOTE: There are some spoilers in the comments …

[Tags: dark_knight entertainment movies reviews ]

23 Comments »

:”Wall-e” is such an amazing movie that it left me unsatisfied.

It’s totally enjoyable. The graphic realism is phenomenal. The creativity of the details is staggering. The directorial vision is superb. The editing is one confusing scene short of perfect.

But “Wall-e” is yet another damn kids story. Oh, adults will completely enjoy it. Scene for scene, it carries you through. You care about the characters and each segment has plenty for everyone. But ultimately the story is predictable, simple, and safe for the kiddies.

At this point in Pixar’s amazing career, it’s proven it can do anything. It can imbue a trash compactor with personality and zip it across a world subject to any rules Pixar imagines. Pixar has the technical skill to show us anything it can imagine. It has the movie-making craft to tell a story with a thousand moving parts.

Now it’s time to stop playing it safe and to and make some art. Now it’s time to stop dazzling us with what it can do, and to do it.

IMO.

[Tags: pixar movies wall-e animation entertainment reviews ]

8 Comments »