Oct 14, 2005
"From here on in, I shoot without a script."
The
Rock Opera "RENT" defined a portion of my life. It led me to an understanding of the
world around me, and of myself, that may have taken me years longer to come to on my own.
Silly and trite as it seems to feel this connected to a musical, the abstraction of themes
and emotions
through music allows you to imprint
on a story in ways that you simply can't with words alone.
Everyone affected by RENT has their own stories, and feels their own personal connection to
the words, the music, and the feelings that they evoke. It's as much a story about love and
life, as it is about grief and loss. It's also a connection to who you were when you
first really heard it, and first felt these things with the characters.
Not your average musical.
Over the years, I've drifted from the theatre, especially from the musical theatre, and
RENT has become somewhat of a footnote in my past.
When I heard that the movie was being made, 9 years late, I was more than just miffed. I
was virulently angry. They'd taken a young, twenty-something cast and let them become
thirty somethings. They'd replaced the spit-fire Mimi and left everyone else in, trying to
play "young." I'm
still a big fan of Anthony Rapp and Taye
Diggs, but Adam Pascal is the
consumate tool now; a Broadway pretty boy.
So when I watched the trailer
tonight, I was not expecting this. I was not expecting to be
taken back 10 years.
I was not expecting to be moved.
They'd taken moments, tiny moments from the show, and expanded them into heart-wrenching images.
The loss is so
tangible, so real, even in just these 2 minutes, that you can't help but feel for this
little family.
Watching some of the videos on the rent blog I
suddenly understood why so many of the original cast were returning. They simply couldn't
let this story go. They had so much to say, so much to bring to it, that they had to see it
through. For the first time in 9 years, they were finally able to finish the story that
Jonathan Larson left unwritten when he passed.
The cast has been documenting the process on the
blog the entire way through shooting, and
hearing them talk about their characters and what they hoped to accomplish with this film
has brought me full circle. I am now more excited about this than any other movie in the
next year.
Add to that the fact that listening to RENT has been synonymous with Thanksgiving for my
best friend and I since 1996 (and he is *not* a fan of musicals) and that the movie is
coming out November 23rd. I will see this movie the day before thanksgiving,
barring an act of god.
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Oct 06, 2005
Wallace and Gromit Come to the Big Screen
I've been a Wallace and Gromit fan (and a fan of AArdman
Animations) for
quite a few years now, ever since catching the original trio of shorts
on PBS.
Chicken Run, the first feature film offering from Aardman Animations was decent, but far from the whimsical,
oddball fun that Wallace and Gromit always seem to find themselves in.
Finally, Wallace and Gromit have gotten their own feature film and I was
so excited upon hearing that news a year ago that I forced myself to forget about the project so that
time would pass more quickly. My theory was that my swiss cheese brain would drop that tidbit of information,
and Wallace and Gromit would simply be out the next time I
thought about it.
Amazingly the tactic worked, and the movie is now in theaters! You can
bet we'll be going to see it soon, perhaps in Rochester on our trip this
weekend.
In the meantime, you can read the outstanding and lovingly written
New
York Times review, play around at the official site
watch
the
featurette at apple, and check out lots more great
shorts by AArdman Animations at AArdman.com
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Jul 15, 2005
In a World of Pure Imagination
We're off to see Willy Wonka tomorrow, and I'm half excited and half terrified that it won't be as clever and
original (if disturbing) as the first.
A simple comment on Kate's blog solved
that:
jellybeanmaggie
2005-07-15 11:02
Just saw it- you'll love it. The Oompa-Loompa songs.. soooo much better! Hurray for Danny Elfman! Anyhow,
dont want to ruin it for you, hope all is well! Enjoy the movie :)
Okay. NOW I'm excited!
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Jun 14, 2005
Why Doesn't Obi-Wan Remember Artoo and Other Questions
Ghent, a blogger on starwars.com does a wonderful job of filling in some
of the logical gaps that become apparent when you've seen all 6 star wars
movies.
*Why doesn't Obi-Wan remember Artoo?
*Why wasn't Leia a
"Hope"?
*Why didn't Owen recognize
C-3PO?
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May 25, 2005
Geeky fun with LSmaker
A brief conversation at
work today gave me a reason to play with
LSMaker,
a
handy Light Saber effect generation tool.
One of my co-workers suggested going to see Star Wars Episode III for
what would be my 3rd time, and I responded: "How many times can you
actually see it in the theater before you start to believe that your
umbrella is a lightsaber?"
"What do you mean my umbrella's not a lightsaber?"
Watch the short movie:
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Mar 30, 2005
Pink Five
I
just stumbled across this funny Star Wars fan-film which follows the
untold story of a hapless x-wing pilot during the attack on the first
death star.
"Hey Red leader, Pink five here. Wow, this is soooo cool.
They totally
don't usually even let me fly, but today they said everyone was
flying..."
Watch the
movie and its
sequel
at AtomFilms
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Mar 16, 2005
Free Schwag With Incredibles DVD
From the Washington Post:
With the swirl of marketing surrounding the DVD
arrival of Pixar's "The Incredibles," not buying it almost
seems like a heroic act. Target is giving away free
sparkling water with purchase; Circuit City tosses a
kid-size "Incredibles" basketball to anyone who snags the
coveted release; and some supermarkets are even offering
gratis groceries. What's next? Complimentary awesome
superpowers for the first 50 customers?
Umm, yeth pleathe. (say it out loud fast, it's funny.)
So yeah, everyone who went to the store got theirs yesterday AND got fun
stuff.
Well, at least Walmart.com refunded my shipping.
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Mar 14, 2005
Sneak Peek at Incredibles DVD Extras
Original Concept Art
Pixar are no
slouches when it comes to packing their DVD's with extras and from the
early reviews, The Incredibles
isn't going to be
an exception to
that rule.
Check out Yahoo's sneak
peek at some of the included extras.
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Mar 13, 2005
Dorking out, Incredibles Style
I'm so
ridiculously excited about getting to see The Incredibles
again, I'm
going to feature at least one bit of Incredibles info a day until I
get my hands on the DVD (and then probably gush some more once I get
it.)
With that, I give you my review, recently posted to IMDB
"The Incredibles" continues Pixar's amazing tradition of infusing
every story they bring to life with an energy and vitality that 99% of
movies, animated or not, lack today.
The storyline of The Incredibles is enjoyable in and of itself, but the
real beauty is in the little moments of reality that are woven
throughout. As an example, there is one moment when "Mrs. Incredible"
is getting ready to pull off a particularly amazing feat. Instead of
having her simply performing the stunt, she takes a moment to psych
herself up, going "okay okay okay!" before she begins. These little
reminders of their humanity are sprinkled throughout and make the
characters extremely easy to relate to.
There are a lot of directions that this story and movie could have gone
and it's certainly not formulaic in the traditional Pixar or Disney
sense. There's moments of moral "grey" for the characters and the true
heart of this movie revolves around the vitality of both the main
characters as they enter middle age, and also the viability of their
marriage as they "sleep" through their thirties and into their 40s.
Finally, the mini-story of the kid's acceptance and discovery of their
powers (itself and allegory for coming of age) adds a real hook for
the younger audience, who may not catch the nuances of Mr. and Mrs.
Incredible's relationship. One of the notable strokes of brilliance of
this movie is that the multi-layered story gives everyone in the
audience a character to personally connect with.
I don't need to own many movies. This one, I MUST buy.
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Mar 11, 2005
The Incredibles is Out on DVD March 15th!
Okay, I can't believe I
didn't get
back to see this movie in the
theaters again. I've been dying to see
The
Incredibles a second time
since the credits rolled at our first viewing.
I'm not a total geek about many things, but at this point I'm a
drooling pixar fanboy. Every movie
that make is infused with fun and
life, owing much to the amazing environment they're created in. Sara,
Jenn, and I watched Finding Nemo something like 13 times while we were
visiting their dad in Virginia last year.
I'm definitely going to be watching this one over and over on the new
widescreen
display.
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Feb 22, 2005
MirrorMask
There's
a new movie coming from
Neil
Gaiman,
Dave McKean,
and
The Jim Henson Company.
MirrorMask
"grew out of talks of doing a
Labyrinth sequel" and
the trailer looks extremely creepy and awesome. Although not the
traditional Henson puppets, the computer animation is stylized enough to
forgive the "Sky Captain" feel.
But
don't just take my word for it...
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Jan 03, 2005
Veronica Varlow Vehicle "Revolver" Closer to Reality
Revolver, the brainchild of
Danger Dame seamstress Veronica Varlow
has moved from a screenplay and some
cool pictures to an amazing trailer.
Although it's still not a full movie (they're looking for investors), the trailer sets the mood amazingly
and then finally gives us a glimpse of the storyline.
Now they've won the Golden Trailer
award which pretty much fast-tracks them to getting picked up by a studio.
Veronica: Jeremy Sisto of "Six Feet Under" presented our category,
"Best
Trailer No Movie". He said, "A regular trailer has to be good enough to get someone to drop 10
bucks. In this category, the trailer has to be good enough to get somebody to drop 10 million
bucks."
And then he said the words..."And the nominees are...."
Read the rest
Our friend PJ just moved to Hollywood to work on
big pictures (he's working on "War of the Worlds" right
now) and this seems right up his alley. I'll have to drop him a line to see if he's interested. As far as I
know, they're still looking for cast and crew.
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Oct 22, 2004
Jersey's Saving Throw
Zach
Braff has
redeemed New Jersey for me.
Garden State is a moody, poignant homage to the inherent
beauty of all of life's various landscapes, physical and
emotional. Even New Jersey's.
Critics have been laying praise on the movie
for months, and it continues to play in mainstream theaters, so I won't
go into everything that made the movie amazing for me, but I will say that if you haven't seen it yet, you need to
see it on the big screen. It's not for everyone, but if it resonates with you, it will impact you in a big way.
The soundtrack is
also so perfectly paired with a movie's varying moods
and the feelings it evokes. I would probably never listen to most of the songs on the album on my own, but as I
listen to the soundtrack now on the way home, I can't help but be drawn back into the world of the movie.
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Oct 01, 2004
Often Imitated, Never Dupli-dupli-dupli-duplicated...
Finally!
Disney is releasing the DVD that I've been waiting for since
they came out with DVDs. Aladdin is at last coming to DVD on October
5th, and it's about time.
This was THE breakout film for Disney in my opinion. Hot on the heels of
The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, both of which were
successful children's movies, came this pithy, endlessly funny
film. It stuck close to the Disney formula but broke it in several very
important ways.
Granted, I've been waiting for it on DVD for so long I don't even know
if I'll like it anymore, but here's what I remember:
- This was the movie that made me love Robin Williams. He's
brilliant, and
they let him Ad-lib tons of dialog which made it a MUCH better movie.
Eddie Murphy has tried to duplicate this phenomenon many times since
(see Mulan
and Shrek) with limited
success.
- The story is
engaging and not completely watered down.
- This movie had the best music of the second "Animated Musical"
Renaissance. The songs rarely felt forced and worked well with the
story, and aside from the obligatory "A Whole New World" ballad, many
of the
songs are up-tempo and funny.
When I was about 14, I had this movie on the same bootleg VHS as
The Addams family and I fell asleep watching one or the other pretty
much every night. I also, for no good reason at all, typed out the
entire script on my computer (this was before the Internet was around
for stuff like that).
Well, I'm embarrassed to tell this story for some reason, possibly for
fear that people will find out that somewhere deep within me is
a repressed Musial theatre dork, but I'd be remiss if I didn't
relay it when talking about this movie.
Sometime around middle school I tried
to put together a "Musical Youth Entertainment Group" of kids who went
around
performing in various venues. It was kind of a half-baked idea (mostly
because we had no idea where we would actually do said performing) but
it was something for me and my friend Brian to do. We were going to
sing songs from Disney + other kids movies and distill the animated
features down into stage productions.
I remember clearly working on the script for the stage version of "The
Lion King" and Brian telling me it would never work. (Yeah,
tell
Julie
Taymor that!)
We made flyers, got kids together and held
rehearsals, and to think back on it, it was one of the first tastes of
leadership that I ever had.
Of course, we all had the attention spans of gnats, so the idea came and
went in a summer. We "grew up," and Brian started doing real High School
musicals the next year. He'd gotten a role in Joseph as one of the
"Chorus
Kids," and watching it back
on video, we were both hooked. It was like being part of a singing
Hollywood, right in our own High School.
M.Y.E.G. became a memory, but a few things stuck with me.
The lessons I'd
learned leading (and ultimately, failing to lead) that little group have
served me endlessly as an RA, a newspaper editor, team leader, and in my
job.
The memories of being 14 and all but uninhibited, belting out "Friend
like me" over a crappy "You Sing..." Karaoke tape with my dad in the
basement will be there forever. Sometimes the memories are bittersweet,
as 10 years later, I look back and know that I may never be that
completely uninhibited again... But hey, we're going to have kids of our
own someday. I hope my dad hung on to a copy of that tape - somehow, I
have a feeling he did.
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Aug 06, 2004
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
I first heard about
Sky Captain and
the World of Tomorrow at the
con
we
went to a few months ago. At that point, all it was was a picture of
Angelina Jolie in front of a retro-futuristic backdrop on a freebie
poster.
The buzz around the movie was that originally, the director had created
a 5 minute 'pilot' which was completely generated on his Macintosh,
which had then been picked up by a major motion picture house and was
being given a full budget to realize it's potential, once again
completely generated on computers. 100% bluescreen + actors.
Various
interviews confirmed the buzz at the con, adding the detail that
it was Jude Law, (Gigolo Joe from
AI) who had discovered
the director
and 5 minute pilot. Apparently, both the stunning effects and stylistic
vision based "future" of the early 1900s was enough to get
him on-board and he recruited other producers (read: money) and big name
talent like Gwyneth Paltrow to join him on the film.
The extended
trailer is online now. I've usually got a really decent
sense for how a movie will do when it's released, and I wish I could say
that I thought this was going to be a great smash hit. I feel roughly
the same about it now as I did about "Final Fantasy: The Spirits
Within"
before it came out. I'm going to see it and probably love it simply for
the Geek Factor, but I don't know if America will bite without at least
a familiar retro character or premise to help justify the stylistic
theme of the film.
Here's hoping the movie proves me wrong.
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Jul 29, 2004
New Batman Prequel Sports Dark Mood, All Star Cast
There's a new
Batman Prequel on the
horizon, and it looks like it's
going to be good.
The first Batman movie was, almost by definition, cool. They had
distilled the concept of Batman down enough to be palatable to movie
audiences, but retained his conflicted nature, brooding
introspection, and almost guilty enjoyment at dealing out his brand of
vigilante justice. The sardonic twist that he'd created his own
greatest super
villain was not lost on the screenwriters, and Jack Nicholson's Joker
was the perfect foil to the Dark Knight.
The movie also gave Gotham the real grit and grime of a city desperate
enough to allow and even call on a vigilante for protection, and the
Gotham of that era was a very plausible "what if" reflection of the
then deteriorating pre-Disney New York City.
The sequels came and went as many sequels of the 80's and 90's did,
riding simply on laurels of the title and built-in audience, while
forgetting
everything the original movie and concept were about. Batman became, once
again, as two dimensional as the comics he was derived from.
Finally, Hollywood has woken up to the real worth of franchise films.
Bringing familiar characters and stories back to a willing audience and
then doing them justice will not only pull in your original audience, it
will also boost DVD sales of the original and grow a bigger core
fan-base.
X-Men, LOTR, and Spiderman are but three recent franchises built on this
premise, and it seems all the major studios are finally beginning to
take notice. The idea of bringing true fans of the original work in and
giving them some control over the project is also taking hold in the
wake of Peter Jacksons lucrative devotion to the spirit (if not the
letter) of Tolkien's work.
Batman Begins has, so
far, differentiated itself from the Batman sequels
by returning to the humanity of the characters, and making the casting
(and budgetary) decisions to back that up. Christian Bale, Gary
Oldman,
Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, and Michael Caine are among the A-List cast.
Each (including even Holmes) has an impressive string of dramatic roles
under their belt and they all stand poised to bring the Batman story
back to life, resurrecting it from the
POW,
BANG, and ZOOM that it had
been reduced to by the recent sequels.
Of course, casting isn't everything, but the mood of the piece already
seems suited to the story. Take a look at the teaser
trailer and see for yourself.
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Jul 04, 2004
Moore, Lion's Gate OK F9/11 Filesharing
I've actually yet to see
this film, as I have certain issues with
Michael Moore's
presentation style, but I can't deny the inherent sense
in his stance on filesharing, as reported by
boingboing
So for all of you that want to take a closer look at certain parts of
Fahrenheit 9/11, or don't have the $10.50 to shell out, you've got the
official
OK to get to the downloading.
Here's the link
to the BitTorrent Tracker on Suprnova.org
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Jun 22, 2004
Crow, Dark City Director at "I, Robot" Helm
Until a few minutes ago, I
had absolutely
no intention of seeing I,
Robot in theaters. Taking Asimov's forward thinking, intellectual
stories which have already seen 2 Hollywood adaptations (
A.I.*
and
Bicentennial man) and
giving them the "T2/Matrix" plot didn't really appeal to me.
There's a new variable in the equation that has my curiosity peaked
though.
The director of The
Crow and Dark
City,
two movies which at
least evoke special feelings for me even if they aren't technically superb, is
behind this new mega-budget behemoth.
I'm very curious to see the direction the film takes now. Alex Proyas
(The Director) has a very distinct comic-booky style, and I can see a
great portion of this movie being devoted to discussion of sentience and
what makes something "alive," where as before I had assumed it would
just be a robot/murder/chase movie.
I don't know if I'll go opening night, but between Proya's cool visual
style and the possibility of a *smart* sci-fi movie, my hopes are
certainly a bit higher now than they were after seeing the ads around
NYC.
*AI was not directly based on an Asimov tale, but was heavily influenced
by his stories and echos many of Asimov's themes.
Stolen from Wired, boingboing,
and Cory Doctorow, who
wrote the article.
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May 31, 2004
The HP3 Buzz Picks Up
Well, it looks like the
general critics (not just the J. K. Rowling
fans) are getting behind the new Harry Potter movie.
I've long been a extoller of the fact that the Potter books aren't
simply about magic and mystery. These are books about dealing with
all the human
feelings and tendencies we wrestle with -
loneliness, anger, selfishness, and power - while trying to become a
good and just
person in spite of the not-so-good things you're feeling. Magic in
Rowling's world is in many ways a tangible expression of those internal
battles each of us face.
Harry's eventual acceptance of all aspects of his personality, good and
bad, is the one over-arching theme of her books from the sorting-hat
scene in book 1 on. It seems that the new director, Alfonso Cuaron, has
zeroed in on the human story within the magic, and his movie may put the
Potter films on the map for audiences well outside of Rowling's devoted
readership.
Check
out the first (NDA breaking?) review online here or check out
The
Leaky Cauldron for lots more daily news updates.
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May 10, 2004
Super Size Me
What would make a grown,
intelligent New Yorker with a vegan girlfriend
eat McDonalds 3 meals a day, every day, for a month?
A great movie concept, that's what.
Morgan
Spurlock, the producer,
director, and star of the new independent
film,
Super Size Me went
through that exact ordeal to make a point, and boy, And by the end of
the movie, with three doctors and a nutritionist who were originally
optimistic about the project telling him to cut it the hell out, does he
ever make one.
What seems at first to be nothing more than a documentary based on ideas
like those at TheSpark.com turns
out to be a poignant, funny epic that makes some very good points.
See more ...
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