Because I have gotten so much amusement from Mike D'Angelo's site: The Man Who Viewed Too Much I feel compelled to add a link and also the note that he turned me on to the Dismemberment Plan's The Face of the Earth which I love, and thus, in counter offer Stay Together by Suede. Amongst my favorite songs ever, should you be able to find it, which, if not, MP3's will be available shoud you ask.

New bonus feature:

Song of the past that I am amazed at how much I like, and thus listen to about 100 times quickly:

Last week: Ah! Leah! by Donnie Iris

This week: Synchronicity II by the Police

M:I:III - C-

There are a lot of things about the Mission Impossible movies that the large majority of people hate. One of my favorite people summed up the most grating thing, though, I think for most people, when he said (of M:i:II): "It is two hours of Tom Cruise being the baddest ass ever" (Hey Peter!)

I should say that I really liked both of the earlier films - I'm torn as to whether what is going on with the franchise is that Tom Cruise is letting auterist directors go nuts with their versions of the same story time and again, which I think he was. The DePalma entry was excellent if excedingly cold. I disliked it more than a little bit when it came out in 1996. I would have given it something like a C+ or two stars then.

Sidenote here: If you are an HTML wizard and know how I can put little notes that would appear as cursor floaties in a nice font on a decent background when you move your mouse over them I would really appreciate that knowledge. What I'm thinking of is the visual equivalent of the awesome technique in David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster Audiobook, which I love. I wish I could microphone in certain points.

I'm back:

I would now rate the movie at a respectable 4 stars or an A-. It isn't perfect, but it manages to grab at something ineffable for a little while. It doesn't ever make Tom Cruise awesome or sexy, but it gets very close. And DePalma's usage of gadgetry as modern wizardry is inspired. It is also gorgeously shot, which, I suppose is de rigeur for movies that cost as much as that, which more about in a bit

M:I:II is a much more complicated monster. It is a better movie. It had a different kind of director and it had one of the best screenwriters ever write it and make several bad decisions.

A lot of people dislike M:I:II on varying levels, and I have no answer to their complaints. There are genuinely bad scenes, but for whatever reason, and I've watched the damn thing about 9 times with the last three of them all intending to dislike it (see, I wish I could insert an audio or extratextual note here because when applying the same standards to "classic" Star Wars, I really disliked it an amazing amount - I still love that movie, but the movie that I love is not the movie that can ever be seen by anyone again, and I don't mean because of Lucas' incessent meddling. I think Lucas knew that he made a very dated/kinda shitty movie that would look historically awful once people actually had access to his source materials (Kurosawa films are obvious, but crappy 70's blaxploitation pictures do have some revelence also), and so he attempted to retroactively cover his tracks), but I simply can't dislike M:I:II because it is utterly awesome.

M:i:II also had the best score of these movies, which leads me to:

The Prestige - A- - ****

I can not help but think that if this had a much better score it would have easily earned "movie of the year"-type honors from me. The score is somewhere between awful and passable. If it had been great, well, I don't know how much more I could have otherwise liked the rest of the movie.

I've now listened to the book it is based on, and every decision Christopher and Jonathan Nolan made was solid. I wish the movie and book didn't devolve into science-fiction on a crucial point, and I had for a long while even after I left the theatre assumed that is wasn't actually science-fiction: I assumed there was a twist coming that explained the weirdness (audio-note here would include a bit about how Memento had mental surprises for the viewer long after one left the theatre which, amazingly, all held together!), but book-listening now in, I think it does indeed have a simply unexplainable element.

That said, I need explanation of the final shot, which is, I believe of Angier's wife in a state. I believe.

There are many incredibly interesting things going on throughout the film, which work on multiple levels. It is an smart screenplay. There are easy and obvious echoes like the fact that this movie about people in the same field that hate each other is interupted briefly at a crucial moment by Edison's goons burning down Tesla's laboratory. (Would-be audio-echo note: David Bowie is _excellent_ as Tesla). There are also minor touches that tend to exist only in very smart screenplays that directors respect completely, like, for exmple, Rupert Angier declaring that the name Danton sounds too French.

For reference, I had the "twist" figured about about 7 minutes into the movie (the book makes it very much more explicit, more or less immediately), but that didn't ruin the experience - it just made me enjoy a secondary character's action much more, emotionally speaking, because those actions became more relevent.

I can't help but think just how excellent it could have been, however, if a decent composer had been in charge of the music.

So back to M:I:III:

This movie makes explicit my cousin's complaint about the second movie: People actually talk about how hot/pretty/awesome Tom Cruise is. "I'd marry him" two women say, at an early moment.

Ye gads!

J.J. Abrams sucks, in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, in that he seems funny and nice and likable in interviews, but he is not even a one-hundredth of a movie director, and unlike the other TV wunderkind of last year that came out and made the big-screen his bitch (Joss Whedon with Serenity said the audio-note), J.J. looks like he has never _seen_ a movie before. I guess I can give him credit, not that I know that this was his intent, in that M:I:III is, by far, the movie that most resembles the TV show that was his inspiration. But that isn't a compliment. At all.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is more menacing than previous baddies John Voight and Dougray Scott, and that's pretty much the only positive comparison that I have.

Other movies seen:

Slither - B
Star Wars - C-
The Lakehouse - B-
X-Men United - C-
Thank You for Smoking - B-

Slither gets ***, and the others get ** should that be your prefered reading rating metric.

Slither also gets notes in the next update, I hope because it is the second horror movie to effectively use Air Supply as foreground music in a horror movie. More on that eventually.

There are many others which I will remember once I get some more sleep.

Movies I have seen recently:

Stay Alive: More in a touch but C+

Brick: B+

Lucky Number Slevin: D+

Nightwatch: T/O

Stay Alive. I Like it very much more than I felt I would/feel I should. It's horribly written in terms of cliche after cliche, and it is somewhat nonsensical. But. It is oddly affecting. Or at least one specific scene is:

I should say that I was watching the "Unrated Version" which apparently extended the following scene by a good solid 30 seconds or more, which is an eternity in film time.

After a character named Phin dies there is a "no shit" cineloquey for him.

I don't know whether this sequence is incredibly awesome and trying to point out the human cost of the awfullness of horror film deaths or if it is amazingly sadistic, because whilst I wasn't at tears, it did put me in a contemplative mood. I guess what is so incongruous about it is that it is very very pretty in spite of the gore. And as it uses the now used-to-death, but apparently not for me, here, Koyanisqaatsi time-lapse effect, it has almost an almost religious aspect.

Also amongst things Stay Alive has is a sequence immediately before the one described in which the character Phin is rocking out to the song "Sweet Dreams" by Air Supply, which is the sort of thing that gives me almost hot fuzzies. If it had been "All Out of Love" it would have been a cheesy touch. That it was "Sweet Dreams" means that somebody was, as some point in their life an Air Supply Fan. That is not a cool thing to admit, and thus the very warm fuzziness.