This movie panel is jammed packed. It’s a Q&A and the fans flocked to the open Mic. Like half the room got up and went to stand in line.
1941, X-Men: The Last Stand, Spiderman 3, La La Land, Thor Ragnarok, Santa Claus : The Movie, Oceans 11, You Dont Mess With The Zohan, Logan, Alien 3, Fantastic Four, Where The Wild Things Are, Greatest Showman, Batman v Superman, Murder Party, Lion King, Up, Hudson Hawk.
Lots of groans, hilarious!
Tonight’s dreams were sponsored by a blend of La La Land, a free ranging musical where strange behavior and boundless physical endurance meet a totally romanticized New York City where there is traffic where traffic is romantic and piers providing perfect picturesque vistas of the cityscape that obviously do not exist. Complete with the background orchestra that provides the structure for the dancing, running, and singing. And nobody is a fat tubby bitch who runs out of gas in the first ten minutes and can’t get past midtown without an oxygen tank and a blintz. Oy Gevalt.
https://www.reddit.com/comments/axv3go/only_this_unlikely_duo_can_stop_doomsday_good/
Here is a link to a trailer for a Good Omens. It’s one of my all time favorite books by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. If you haven’t read it, YOU REALLY SHOULD. I can’t wait for this series to come out! It’s on Amazon Prime, so thankfully I can watch it on a borrowed Prime account.
David Tennant as Crowley. I love it!
We went to the fan special release tonight of Captain Marvel. We thought it was standard, but Scott and his eagle eyes caught that it was Real3D. The movie is quite good, standard comic book fare. Fury and Marvel had great chemistry. Annette Benning did a marvelous job in her part, and Goose the Cat damn near stole the show. This one was a four out of five, for me. It was evenly paced and not a lot of shocks or surprises really. Mostly a bunch of “Ah” and “okay…”
How do you communicate differently online than in person, if at all? How do you communicate emotion and intent in a purely written medium?
Each medium has it’s own benefits and vulnerabilities. You can’t communicate the same way from one medium to another. When I’m online I find myself preferring email, iMessage/SMS, and Instant Message because you cannot beat the signal to noise ratio of text. When I’m using my cell phone, I prefer to only communicate over iMessage/SMS because the carrier I’m using, Sprint, has a terrible record of dropped calls and rather poor voice quality. Plus text eschews much of the wrappings of verbal communication, there is no need to preamble and no need for closure statements to indicate communications have concluded, usually. Generally, face to face conversations vary between formal and informal, and I have found that elaboration and clarity excel in formal face to face communications but are annoying in informal senses. When it comes to capturing backchannel cues and extended emotional content in media that doesn’t really have a good capacity to carry that information a wonderful shortcut is the cinema. I have found that it’s quite handy to refer to a common corpus of movies in which quoting scenes can convey everything from mood, through atmosphere, including sense and quite often, the message itself. The only issue is establishing that cinematic common corpus that those that communicate with me need to make sense of some of the shorthand phrases that I use to carry backchannel messages.
What movies? There are so many. Off the top of my head, pretty much anything Disney has produced because it’s ubiquitous. Comedies are rich with great scenes and raw material and I find myself referring to the classics such as Airplane!, Clue, Noises Off, Planes-Trains-and-Automobiles, Transylvania 6-5000, and the entire oeuvre of Mel Brooks, such as Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. Also, worth mentioning is a classic comedy, The Kentucky Fried Movie. There are also other movies that lend detail and depth that aren’t really comedies, such as “Love, Actually.” and “Serendipity”. Then of course scifi movies like Serenity, the Alien series of movies, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Generally, since I keep much of this for the informal channel of communication the people who need to understand this corpus have likely seen these movies several times, likely with us.
Do you feel uncomfortable when you see someone else being embarrassed? What’s most likely to make you squirm?
There is two distinct levels of cringe. The first is rather quite pleasant and that is Schadenfreude. When someone gets what they have coming to them, usually in spades, it’s actually a delight. Few things are finer than being witness to a hearty comeuppance.
The second form, which I’ve witnessed in romantic comedies and certain other dark-humor comedies tends to trot out the agony and the awkwardness and projects it in full fidelity right into you. It’s unpleasant and usually breaks the comedic force that it was trying to carry. Movies like Bridesmaids and anything starring Will Ferrell pretty much fall into this category. At first it comes across as foolish and sophomoric and then quickly dissolves into cringe squick. If I can avoid witnessing this second form, I’ll take the opportunity.
Does the collision of beauty, attention, drugs and promiscuity always lead to suicide?
This was a question that came to me after reading a few reports in the news about adult entertainers who were committing suicide. I’m not sure if it is that their suicides are remarkable or rather that sensationalist reporting is to blame for concentrating the reports in the popular media. It seems to be a common thread in the adult entertainment industry. That people who appear to have everything have personal wreckage that they are carrying around and eventually they just can’t cope with what is unfolding in their lives and they shoot or hang themselves.
If its a natural extension of their lifestyles, an extension of the Hollywood dysfunction, where fame, power, money, attractiveness, and drugs collide in ruined lives then this post is just a subset of that, but to me it seems that this sort of thing appears to happen to adult entertainers with remarkable regularity.
I suppose the adage of the candle that burns twice as brightly lasts half as long. In it may be a lesson against the Adonis complex. Working so very hard to look like the people you see in the movies or on TV (or in more prurient forms of entertainment) is actually one more thing that is, in the end, bad for you. The best way to be is to be who you are. Don’t try to be like anyone else, just be the best you that you can be. If that best you carries around weight, or some other not-in-the-ideal characteristic it is likely best to celebrate that feature of yourself. If the Hollywood “clone machine” is any lesson, when you get what you think it is that you want, you find that it’s actually nothing and eventually that makes you sad. Does it lead to suicide? Probably not, but it probably isn’t good for you either.
This gets me thinking that fame should be listed as a negative life event, kind of like a self-defeating Trojan Horse. It looks good on the outside, but it’s jammed with disaster on the inside. Perhaps the feelings of “not being enough” is a healthy warning against the false gold of the object of your pursuit.
Last night Scott and I went to see Iron Man 3. The movie was a nice summer movie that came out too early. It should have been released in June or July. Generally the best part of the movie was the time spent in the dialogue between Tony Stark and the kid was the best section of that movie.
The movie was okay, it wasn’t as good as the first two movies and it squandered the Mandarin character. Sir Ben Kingsley was pretty much wasted in the role of the Mandarin, and casting the Mandarin as a shill ruins the central tale behind Iron Man. Tony’s primary battles are alcoholism, his relationship with his father, Pepper Potts, and on a grand scale the battle between Technology and Magic. The Mandarin is supposed to be in command of supernatural powers provided to him by the Rings of Makulan. Tony is the expression of humanity wielding Technology and the central story is this battle between the supernatural and the technological. This movie also trots out Extremis. The comic books and the Iron Man Anime forged a canon that Extremis was a tool for Tony to use to bridge the gap between the organic and inorganic so that Tony could be on-par with his technology as much as the Mandarin is on-par with his magic.
The movie pretty much squashed Extremis as a sideline curiosity, elevated AIM to primary villain status and squandered the Mandarin. In the comics AIM was always the bumbling army of grunting henchmen, they weren’t clever or particularly villainous, they were principally retarded thieves. But the movie pretty much just shat all over all of it.
Marvel’s excuse that they trot out to calm the criticisms down is that the movies exist in a parallel universe called the ‘cinematic universe’ so these issues don’t matter. That feint gives them an out to write whatever they want, essentially giving a pass to all this character mangling.
I would not see this movie again, once is enough, and due to a rather prolonged free fall scene I would definitely not see this movie in IMAX. The content is okay, but not worth 3D or DBOX prices. I would give it 7/10 stars. It is qualitatively worse than the previous movies.
PAD 3/13/2013 – Silver Screen
Take a quote from your favorite movie — there’s the title of your post. Now, write!
“I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!”
Without a doubt my favorite movie of all time is Airplane. Anyone who knows me really should watch and learn because that movie is one of the best and funniest movies that has ever been made. There are so many kinds of comedy expressed in that movie that it makes me giggle uncontrollably even just recalling some of them. The quote from Lloyd Bridges, playing McCroskey is just one of many, but it’s one of the most useful especially for me at work. There are times when work tries me so much that the escalating substance abuse lines that McCroskey says during the movie accurately reflect much of my emotional state of disbelief that I endure while at work. Whenever I’m feeling down, or when happiness just seems a little out of reach I’ll play this movie for myself and I always feel so much better afterwards.
I wrote before about how blogging is kind of like therapy. So are the movies, especially this movie. The ability to laugh is essential and laughter is much like a hug from a loved one. To quote one of the best lines from one of my favorite TV series, which is Pushing Daisies, a hug is like an emotional heimlich maneuver. It grabs you and helps you eject awful feelings and makes life better. Laughing while hugging? Why, yes! Better than any drug!