Marc's comments (member since Aug 28, 2008)

Marc's comments from the Movies We've Just Watched group.

Tom wrote: "Marc, yeah, WATCHMEN is at least a better film than the vile monstrosity 300, but that's about the faintest praise imaginable. And WATCHMEN really does go wildly overboard in the Bone-Crunching Fo..."

All true. As I said in my blog comments, the ordinary humans in the movie are not really supposed to be kick-ass, take-no-prisoners types, and making them that way just detracts from the point of the story. I saw them (in the book) as representing ordinary men in a world with extraordinary powers just trying to go on with their lives. Making them into superheroes, even low-power ones, invalidates that, leaving us a story without a hero to relate to. The dog-owner, the prison break, and the assassin were all pretty gratuitous and unsubtle. The book did all of them better.

Tom wrote: "WATCHMEN are particularly poisonous offenders."

I just saw Watchmen yesterday and I didn't find it especially poisonous, although I agree the violence was out of place. In my view the purpose of Nite Owl and Silk Specter was to be the human observers/survivors, literal watch-men. I commented at greater length on it at http://marcvunkannon.blogspot.com

Normally I'm not a fan of sex scenes as they rarely propel the story (at least in print), but I was very interested by A History of Violence, and the way it uses the two sex scenes to show the change not only in Tom/Joey but also the change in his wife. The DVD extra highlighting the Gangster Sex scene was very informative in that regard.

I watched Grand Canyon again, on Thanksgiving. I always get more out of films like that one. Blogged about it at http://marcvunkannon.blogspot.com just because the spirit moved me to.

"Did you ever get the feeling that this story's too damn real and in the present...tense? Or that everybody's on a stage and it seems like you're the only person sitting in the audience?"

Sorry. My favorite song.

Just saw the latest Indiana Jones. I'm left wondering if either Lucas or Spielberg have any original bones in their bodies.

Push. Much more interesting and convoluted than your usual superhero/action film.

Equilibrium
Pitch Black
Aliens
Star Trek 4

Mawgojzeta wrote: "I just watched THE ORPHANAGE (El orfanato) last night. Wow. Loved it. I would compare it to THE CHANGLING (1980 starring George C. Scott) as far as quality of the story and feeling when the movi..."

Ooo, I liked the Changeling! Gotta look this up.

Steve-O wrote: "How did you feel about the films, Marc?"

Some spoilers ahead.

The Judas Chalice is a fairly typical comic adventure in the Librarian series. The Librarian started out as a Sherlock Holmes-type character stuck in an Indiana Jones environment. Later installments made him more Indiana Jones himself, and they were less funny. The first is by far the best, then this one, with the second a distant third. Which is kind of odd, since the second and third had the same producers and director, but somehow they got it right this time. The characters are a bit more real, the relationships more plausible, the humor is better, the story less predictable. This time out, the Librarian is supposedly on vacation in New Orleans when he gets involved with some Russian agents, seeking the Judas Chalice, a cup made from Judas' 30 pieces of silver and supposedly able to resurrect vampires. Two things that always bother me about the series: one, they make a running gag about expenses, even though he retrieves the artifacts from caches filled with treasure and leaves the treasure, and two, they don't keep the same leading lady from one film to the next. These movies are made for TV by the way, with extensive use of CGI to give them a much larger feel.

A History of Violence was excellent, in spite of a few flaws that occurred to me long after it was over. The story centers around Tom Stall, a family man with an idyllic life in an idyllic Indiana town, until murderers on a killing spree come into his diner. He kills them instead, and is hailed as a hero for it. The point of the movie is, in part, about the effects of this violence on this family. The son, before the event, talked his way out of confrontations. After the event he confronts the same bully directly and beats him bloody.
The story takes a darker turn when Carl Fogarty from Philadelphia shows up, claiming that Tom is really Joey Cusack, a violent character from Philly. Tom denies it, but Fogarty keeps up the pressure until Tom is forced to act as Joey to protect his family. At this point everybody in the family, except possibly the young daughter, is forced to confront not only the stranger their father/husband has become, they also have to face their own darker natures as they 'acquire' histories of violence they hadn't had before. Tom Stall has to confront his past directly before he can go back home, only to find that home no longer exists. They have all become strangers to each other and themselves. The ending is ambiguous, although the script indicates that there is hope, but no more than that. I saw it as positive, with possibilities of a stronger family resulting over time. One element left unexplored was the reason why Joey decided to devote three years to becoming Tom and leaving his violent life behind in the first place. It could be surmised that it was a survival tactic that became more than he'd intended when he started it, but not much is said about it, either way. I'll be watching this again someday, with a better DVD. I got this from the library and some parts were scratched and unwatchable. I want to get the whole story on this one.

Just finished David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, as well as the third movie in the Librarian series, The Curse of the Judas Chalice.

Matt wrote: "I saw STALKER years ago at Lincoln Center and ANDREY RUBLYOV at Anthology Film Archive both viewings well worth the experience; and this is at a combined screen time of approximately seven hours. I..."

I saw ANDREY RUBLYOV (or however it's spelled) as part of a class I was taking on Russian literature. The form was called a hagiography, or saint's life, and the class was about how various different stories about different people, used that form.

I just got the DVD for Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which has two commentary tracks. One is a standard commentary with several of the stars of the show chiming in, but they also wrote a second 'show' called 'Commentary', a continuous set of musical numbers by various cast members that was completely unrelated to the movie playing on the screen except to occasionally mention what was happening.

In Buffy S7 he played a woman-hating priest who was a willing servany of the First, the immortal spirit of Evil. Very creepy character.
In Slither, he plays a sherrif of a small town where aliens have landed and start taking over, one body at a time. The aliens are little wormy things. Cool movie.

Firefly
Serenity
and Buffy Season 7

The real benefit to the DVD is the two commentaries, one a musical all by itself, the other a real commentary on the show. The extras are fun too.

To see Dollhouse you can go to Hulu.com and search for it. Or at least you could. That's how I watched all the episodes last year.

I'm working on memorizing all the words to the commentary. Already know the show itself.

I just got the DVD, with the Musical commentary as well as a real commentary, and some other special bits. I hope there's a sequel, I heard rumors of one.

Please. Just look at all the books with sexy, heroic vampires in them. This has been going on for a while now. Getting to the character level had to wait until the characters were no longer under copyright, in Holmes' case, or they were deliberately trying to restart a dying franchise, in Star Trek's case. Either way the established character is just a hook. I'm in no rush to see those movies or read those books until lots of other people have bitten those hooks and can say whether they're worth it. My usual reaction to anything that apes something that's been done before is to leave it alone.

Watching some Harold Lloyd silents on an anthology DVD, as well as some Gilbert & Sullivan DVDs. So far I've seen Patience, with Princess Ida and The Gondoliers waiting in the wings. I also have another version of The Three Musketeers on hand.