18 posts tagged “movie”
What never fails to make you laugh?
Submitted by BeautifullyBroken.
Maybe I'm mellowing but I rather like this question. I mean, it could mean so many things, like what kind of books make you laugh? What jokes make you laugh? What situations make you laugh? It's just a nice way of looking at things.
Of course, as a cynic and a possible pessimist, it could also be used as "What makes you laugh with cynicism? What causes you to give a mocking laugh?"
Though, I'm not typically a one who will give a mocking laugh or a poo-poo-ing laugh. I think it's passive aggressive. If I think something you're doing is stupid, I'll cut you a side-eye or make a "Who farted?" face. There will never be a question as to how I feel.
What makes me laugh? Let's start a list:
Movies:
Beerfest - yes, I know. No, seriously, I know. It's a movie about a beer competition. But it makes me happy, stop judging me)
Blazing Saddles - LOVE this movie. Absolutely love it. I lent it to a friend who's husband had fond memories of it from his youth and so she sat while he watched the movie, watching to see if he laughed. That's so much pressure! Would it surprise you to hear he wasn't able to laugh at any of it?)
Ghostbusters - I'm sorry but if you don't like Ghostbusters, we need to have a serious conversation. I'm not going to judge you for not liking Ghostbusters 2, though I thought it was quite good, but Ghostbusters! Come on! It's a work of genius!)
The Addams Family 1 & 2 - Whatever you think about the second one, Joan Cusack is genius and I love her. Plus her attempts to kill Fester make me laugh like a donkey.)
Team America - What can I say? Besides "Matt Damon!"?
I'm sure there are some I'm missing (though I mostly watch action movies) but those are off the top of my head.
Books:
Dave Berry's Guide to Guys - irreverent and it plays off of stereotypes but it's so good-humoured with this strain of cynicism, it's almost like me, distilled as a comedy book.
... okay, that seems to be it. I mostly read romances and suspense fiction. Some of those are laughs but it's mostly because the writing or situations are really bad.
TV
How I Met Your Mother - I just did a marathon of Season 1 and 2 and it is so funny, mixed with sweet, mixed with booze and topped with whipped cream and cherry. Love.
Big Bang Theory - I wasn't wild about this show when it first came out. I thought all the jokes would be grotesque stereotypes (Oh look! Nerds can't get laid!) but it's not. It's a lot sweeter than that. It feels like the writers like the characters and aren't willing to be vicious or cruel, just for an easy joke.
And... huh. I don't seem to watch a lot of comedy shows either. Mostly action or sci-fi which contain humour but aren't the "traditional" sitcom.
Is this the point where I have to assure you all that I am actually a girl?
And will I have to assure you again when I tell you I also like Family Guy?
As for jokes and things, I prefer jokes that aren't at someone's expense, in the sense that, while I may joke around, I don't like jokes where the heart of the joke is vicious.
How many times can I fit "joke" in a sentence? Damn, no wonder I never cut it as a writer.
I'm not a fan of practical jokes since it seems the basis of those are to make the person look ridiculous. I don't mind a crass joke if it's properly funny, that is, if it's funny in it's own right, regardless of crassness. Though I'll take the occasional poop joke. I like those.
I like word play jokes because it lets me use my brain sometimes.
But mostly, I just like to laugh. I like the weird witch's cackle I get when I'm feeling particularly evil, the weird deep throated laugh that I have no idea when I developed.
Mmm, funny things. I like funny things.
"I'm sick of these monkey-flying snakes on this Monday to Friday plane!" HA!
God I love tv editing.
Have you ever walked out of a movie?
Submitted by Jack Yan.
Funny story:
When I was younger (probably around 18 or 19 years old), there was a girl at my church who worked at a movie theatre. It seems that they were having a large number of people walk out of a particular film. She had to watch it because she had to figure it out.
The movie was Crash (the David Cronenberg one about people sexually aroused by car crashes) and the scene most people walked out of was the one where James Spader and Elias Koteas have sex in a car.
Awesome, especially since James Spader was still gorgeous (instead of slightly bloaty) and Elias Koteas was ... well, he was Elias Koteas before he became a little more middle-aged. If you've never seen younger Elias Koteas, you need to rent his movies. He's... unexplainably attractive.
I ended up watching it a few years later (thank you, Showcase, for your amazing ability to show movies without editing for swearing or nudity!) and it was actually a really good movie. But yeah, I can understand not wanting to watch it in a movie theatre.
Okay, so I'm only about 15 minutes into the movie and all I have to say is:
80s action movies are FUCKED UP.
Thanks, I really needed the two rape scenes within 5 minutes of each other. That'll leave me with sweet dreams tonight. Now I just have the gruesome murders of the perpetrators to look forward to.
... maybe I should stop watching. But I want to know why these were so popular!
Superman is a dick.
Christopher Reeve was hot.
Gene Hackman better have bought a house with the money they paid him to be in that crap.
Oh, and you need more proof that Superman is a dick? Here you go.
Begin flaming me ... NOW.
PS, seriously, how can you argue against him being a dick? He walks Lois Lane off a roof and then, while flying through the mountain range, let's go of her hand and LET'S HER FREE FALL. DICK.
I've never heard it referred to as this but then again, I don't think anyone's ever come out this forcefully and angrily as these two women.
The best part? I could see myself, especially when you hit minute 2:40 (NSFW because of rampant cursing, just the kind of cursing I like):
ETA: Sorry, one more thing. It seems that M. Night Shyamalan is making a live action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's technically a children's cartoon but many adults in my family LOVE it. But rather than using an all Asian cast, since the entire cartoon is set in a fantasy Asian-like world and the animated cast is fairly Asian, he's using basically an all-white cast.
Hey, thanks for that; because it's not hard enough for Asians to find work on-camera. Plus I already think you're a hack and now my sister won't make me watch any of your shitty movies. YAY!
Seriously, how can a vampire movie with Adam Baldwin go wrong?!
::sigh:: This is how. This movie. The ... let's start at the beginning:
Recommendation: You could watch it. I mean, I did, so it's physically possible to watch this movie. Should you watch it? That kind of depends on how much you like Adam Baldwin with a bad hick accent and bad hick clothes. Oh, and gushes of blood and none of the sensuality that other vampire films have, even some of the really bad ones. You also get Jeremy Sisto with a wavering accent, one that goes from Eastern European to hicky southern (and damn, I feel bad for Southerners. I'm fairly certain few of your accents are as bad as he makes it seem) to just his regular accent.
I kind of hope that they all did this movie because they really needed the money, rather than because they thought the script was super cool.
Especially you, Neil Jackson. How... I... You were so hot in Blade: the Series! You were amazing as Marcus! Did you really need the money?! Because I would have been happy to have a bake sale or something to help you out. Especially if you were going to walk around without a shirt. But this movie? SO beneath you.
And Adam Baldwin. I know you've done really bad movies before. REALLY BAD movies. But still.
You want an actual story line after that? All righty:
The story is about a man and a woman, recovering addicts. The woman (I can't be bothered to remember or look up her name) has cancer and is concealing this and her chemotherapy from the man. As someone who's had a family member go through cancer and chemo, I'm not sure how she was able to do this. The hair falling out would have been my first clue that something wasn't right, but she also seemed like a wig girl. It's possible that fooled him.
Finally she tells him, after she vomits while she's stripping (in ballet slippers, oddly enough. Who knew?) and is hospitalized. After he freaks out, she checks herself out of the hospital (after having a nonsense conversation with a girl with hemophilia SPOILER!) and kills herself in their tub... which, um, I'm trying to decide if I should say something about suicide and killing yourself where someone you love will find you and how selfish that is but at the same time, I really don't want more people hating me, even though it is seriously selfish and if you're going to kill yourself, do it somewhere it's easy to clean and holds no meaning for someone else in your family.
He becomes despondent (and no, I don't remember his name either and no I'm fairly certain you haven't seen him in anything, though he tends to look like a few other actors from varying angles. It's kind of freaky), grows a beard and then puts her things in little zip loc bags so he can sniff then.
No, I'm serious, he sniffs her chapstick. It's creepy.
THEN his friend enters, who looked disturbingly like Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild fame (who I really want to punch in the face), and is all charming and sweet. It kind of made me want to punch him in the face a little harder, until I realized it wasn't Joe Francis and promptly stopped caring.
Blah blah blah, dead girl is dancing in the club, guy keeps trying to find her. He follows her new "family" to a children's Bible camp (boring) and is quickly found and turned.
I have to say, the writer's vision of turning includes ripping out parts of the throat and buckets of blood gushing out, is rather disconcerting. It's kind of like if Quentin Tarantino decided to direct this movie. I prefer the Blade version where it's all sexy and fun.
Blah blah blah, being a vampire and drinking blood is an addiction, they run away from the family, go cold turkey and the rest of the family comes by to kill them. Do they come in a group? Of course not. They come one at a time, because that has historically always worked well.
I really want a sarcasm font.
Hemophilia girl (who's actually quite good and much better than this movie really needed) gets killed by three of the vampires and then when the vampires are shot, their blood doesn't clot and they gush through their wounds. I don't completely understand that whole thing but whatever. Then there are things with sunlight and killing the rest of the family and then they...
SPOILER
Kill themselves by holding hands in the sunlight.
... sorry, wait just one sec. I've got to get my eyeballs back in their normal place. I rolled them too hard.
Is this an awful movie? Yes.
Could it have been redeemed? Meh.
Am I being too hard on it? Probably. I think it was my disappointment that Neil Jackson was fully clothed the entire time and Adam Baldwin had an awful, decidedly unsexy accent.
Should you watch it? I'm not your mother, I won't stop you. But it's a waste of almost two hours. They never really present any of the mythos they're adhering to so you're left to guess (hint: crosses and holy water don't do anything) and everyone looks dirty. I like my vampires sexy and clean looking, if rather pale.
I also prefer it if vampirism isn't presented as an addiction (really? An addiction? Thanks, writers. Did you know that witchcraft is an addiction too? It's also symbolic for lesbianism! Just ask Joss Whedon!) and then there was this weird thing where two of the vampires were Chinese, didn't actually speak to anyone in the movie and spent their time giving lap dances and eating people.
... I'm not sure how I feel about that. I have the feeling I'm edging to violently indifferent.
Stupid movie, stupid plot, thank god everyone's dead.
Sorry I haven't really been posting; I'm not in a particularly good mood and my brain's not really working. I think if I posted something outside of a review, it would just be a string of cursing with nonsensical asides about gophers.
Let's get this out of the way:
Recommendation: I really liked this movie.
... I KNOW! I was surprised too! But I did. It was sweet and fluffy and just didn't take itself seriously. I loved the music, I loved the costumes, I loved how much fun it looked.
Dudes, it made me love blue sparkly eye shadow. How huge a feat is THAT?!
I remember when it was released, it was considered a huge flop. Everyone was expecting a huge follow up movie, after My Big Fat Greek Wedding (which I still haven't watched yet) did insane numbers and were really disappointed that Nia Vardalos did this movie.
But for me, and for the little that I have seen of MBFGW, it does follow in the same kind of vein. They're both just sweet movies. They're not meant to be earth-shattering, flag waving, ideology changing movies; they're gentle nudges, laughs exposing you to something you may or may not already know about. It's what she's good at, it's what makes the movies as good as they are.
The story is about two girls (I'm not completely sure where they're from. I'm fairly certain it's east coast but I'm don't remember where and I'm not going to guess) who dream of making it big (-ish, since they tend to target dinner theatre, though this may be my own ignorance of dinner theatre that makes me feel it's slightly lower tier). They get slightly involved with a gangster, unknowingly get passed his drugs, see him get killed then run away from the killers to LA, the land of no culture (hey, don't get mad at me; they said it) because they're certain the killers won't find them there. When they get to LA, they find the only place with any sort of live entertainment scene, a drag bar.
And it really just goes from there. Connie and Carla become a huge hit, drawing both straight and gay crowds and eventually, drawing the attention of the gangsters out to get them.
It's a fairly straight forward comedy (please don't call it a chick flick. I will kick you so hard). Nia Vardalos is hilariously funny, even though she, quite obviously, didn't train as a dancer. She's not an awful dancer, far from it, but standing next to Toni Collette, she's a little more awkward and a little less fluid. Toni Collette is amazing, as she is in pretty much everything, even the very disappointing Shaft. David Duchovny is charming and sweetly romantic as Connie's love interest and more importantly, for me, as a person who doesn't know very much about the drag scene, it seemed fairly respectful and loving towards the drag queens in the movie.
Should you go see it? Yes. Why? Because I liked it. I don't like a lot of things and I liked this. I don't like a lot of people and I love Nia Vardalos. I hate karaoke and I would go karaoke-ing with her. This isn't something you'd watch if you're looking for something to change your world but if you just need a pick-me-up, it's perfect.
I was going to make a Coyote Ugly joke here but my brain seriously isn't working.
I'm still trying to decide how to review this movie without giving it away. Maybe let's start with the hype: many of my friends who'd seen this told me it was better than Matrix. Reviews I'd read said it was the movie that Matrix wanted to be but never really lived up to.
Poppycock.
For me, it's more like Children of Men but sterilized... um, not literally. (HA!... sorry, CoM infertility joke) While CoM is shabby shades of grey, Equilibrium is blinding white and dark black, sharp even in its shades of grey. Also, the story was grounded in more of a sense of reality. Even though both reflect a type of dystopia, with The Matrix, there is still a bit of a division between fiction and non-fiction; very few people would mistake the reality of The Matrix with the reality of life.
Very few people would ever believe we are, in fact, living in The Matrix. But Equilibrium? It's almost shocking how easy it would be for us to fall into a society like the one depicted.
The setting: The survivors of World War III created a new civilization, eradicating all extreme emotion, art, music and love. To keep everyone on that even keel, each morning, every citizen injects themselves with a serum. In every area of the city, televisions play continuously, never leaving a quiet moment, never giving a chance for introspection or true thought or meditation.
The citizenry are policed by a special squad, specially trained to eradicate all rebellion, those who would wish the death of the leader, called The Father, who wish to feel without risk of death. All those who've ceased to inject their serum are put to death. By incineration.
Preston, a Cleric of the highest level, one morning accidentally drops his serum bottle. When he isn't able to replace the dose, he begins to feel and the story really begins.
I'm really not sure how much I can say about the movie without giving away too much of it. I can't talk about my favourite scene; I don't want to ruin your experience of it. The movie builds so gradually that until the finale begins and you start breathing again do you realize you stopped breathing before. The director's use of light and shadow can make you cry in one scene and adds to the action in another. The chemistry between Preston and Mary is so palpable and conveyed so well by Christian Bale and Emily Watson, they're able to show how deep the emotional is between their characters with just a touch of their hands, a meeting of their eyes in a mirror.
And I'll admit, I was composing a scathing review of one of the villains' deaths as anti-climactic, a rant how a good villain deserves a good death when it changed into an amazing death scene, absolutely fitting a good villain.
Yes, I'm not going to talk about the religious undertones, about how the police are now referred to as "Clerics" and how children who wish to become Clerics go through schooling in a Monastery. If I talked about this, the post would be longer than a graduate thesis.
Recommendation: Definitely recommend. The fight choreography isn't as slick as in The Matrix but still very good. Excellent villain death scenes and a sensuality that is unusual to find in a (fairly) mainstream movie. If you don't like it, come back and yell at me.
Now I need to find myself a book of poetry by Yeats.
It has been a long time since I've done one of these. Let's see if I remember how:
This isn't a BBC version of Agatha Christie's A Caribbean Mystery; oh no, it's an American version with everything that's good and bad that implies:
The good? The guy who played the blonde brother in Simon & Simon. I loved that show and I had the biggest crush on him. Then I moved on to Gerald McRaney who aged a lot better than he did, then moved on to have crushes on guys closer to my age. They also did a really good job in setting up the story and explaining who everyone is.
The bad? ::cough:: Well, that's the rest of the review.
I've always found that, for me, a lot of the Miss Marple adaptations really live and die by Miss Marple and the woman who plays her. I find Joan Hickson too dry with not enough twinkle (an opinion not shared by many) but then the newest Miss Marple, Geraldine McEwan, is a little too much twinkle and flutter but not enough of the razor sharp mind.
Yes, I'm quite picky.
But this Miss Marple? Wow... um, she's awful. She can't hold her English accent (she goes positively Southern US once in a while) but she's also so mincey and fluttery and woolly, you wonder how she's able to keep thoughts in her head. There's so much exclaiming and jumping up and running around, it's like watching a farce.
Then the story. I don't know who asked these (fairly) capable actors to act in the way they do but whoever it is needs a slap. Not only did I not sympathize with any of these characters (except for the Major who dies initially, which is not in the spirit of the book AT ALL) but I was actively hoping most of them would be killed off in a snuff adaptation. That would have made me feel better after watching them poop out their version of a fairly good mystery novel.
My biggest problem with the adaption? All the yelling. Why all the yelling? And when did the characters all become Americans? Nothing against Americans because I'm sure they holiday in the Caribbean but most of the book's characters (except for Lucky and Greg Dyson, I believe) are all British.
And when did Ruth Walter become a brassy woman on the prowl? No offense to Swoozie Kurtz (even though I kept wanting to call her Sissy Spacek) but your voice hurts my ears. The most defining description of Ruth (who I could almost swear was Esther in the book... but then sometimes my memory of names isn't the greatest) was her quiet disposition, her subdued nature, her ability to handle Mr. Rafael when others were defeated instead of yelling at him like a crazed fishwife.
Okay, so I'm not sure what a fishwife is but I've always loved that description. It makes me think of a a crazy woman wearing a bathrobe and rubber boots with crazy hair, yelling and wagging her finger at a giant fisherman, cowering in the face of her anger.
Is this the worst adapation ever? No, BBC's version of Body in the Library is. Seriously, how do you mess up that adaptation? They probably used all their inspiration in hiring Joanna Lumley as Dolly then their brains shorted out and they thought, "You know what's current and in fashion? Lesbians. Let's make the murderer a lesbian instead of the ACTUAL murderer from the book. We're clever." BAH.
Recommendation: You actually should watch this movie, if just to see the staging and the obvious, "I'm VERY EVIL!" glares given by the actors while they stand stock still as the camera pans past them. But go in to it expecting not a very good film.
I know I mention many times how NOT like the book this movie is; my problem isn't so much that the story isn't a mirror image of the book but that the changes aren't improvements. If you're going to change something, shouldn't you be changing something for the better?
