They might forget Ted
December 17th 2001 -
Oh… how embarassing. I forgot to mention Ted in that list of excellent company for the “They Might Be Giants” concert. It’s cause you were over the other end of our group, Ted. Also, we took off like a bat out of hell from the train station *just* catching a train, which in retrospect was pretty silly. Would waiting around for twenty to thirty minutes having a chat, been such a bad idea? Bugger. Um, anyway, Ted’s company was particularly delightful, because he had his “extremely humorous” mode toggled up to eleven which makes him funnier than Peter Cook.
Fully sick mate
Well, it was going to be a weekend of work, but I woke up on Saturday feeling very, very poorly. I went into work, couldn’t do anything, went home, and Anna and I watched a bunch of movies while taking headache tablets and complaining. As usual, Anna got hardly sick at all, and was over it by Saturday afternoon. But I’m still feeling it now. Yuck. I managed to get into work on Sunday anyway, and did a fair bit of work though I suspect it will be of rather dubious quality. Most frustrating – I ended up changing a lot of code, something from almost every class, in order to make this tiny, tiny fix.
Swordfish
First up in the movie marathon was swordfish, a very, very dubious film that has dated horribly since the WTC attack. Its premise is that the bad guys are the lesser of two evils – all those people they kill to get the billion dollars they are after, are collateral damage. Their true mission is to take horrible revenge on terrorists so that terrorism becomes impossible.
Like I said, rather dated. The morals behind the thing was fairly objectionable to begin with, and it does the usual bunch of car chases and explosions and implausable plans and twists that make no sense so that by the end of it Anna and I were booing and throwing popcorn at the screen. Luckily, microwaved, unbuttered popcorn.
Stickmen
Somewhat better but still disappointing was Stickmen, a New Zealand film about pool. I got very excited about this, as I want to shoot some pool footage too, and thought it’d give some nice tips. Looks like I’ll have to rent out “The Hustler” or (ugh) “The Colour Of Money”, ’cause they are shamefully lacking interesting shots. It is the pool equivalent of battle sequences in the various starwars films – a rather tiring series of balls being slammed into pockets, with no context about the game, or indication of how well they are setting up shots, or snookers, or any of the things that would make it interesting. I guess pub pool is like that at high levels, but I really think there’s more they could show. A choice between two shots, for goodness sake! Is that too much to ask for?
Anyway, as they said in the director/writer’s commentry, they wanted to concentrate on making the film as much like “Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels” as possible, which didn’t feature any pool at all. Um, actually, I make have hallucinated that bit – I’m pretty sure they just said that they were trying to do relationships a bit more, and that the audience would be bored by the pool. Well, they sure as hell were, with they way you did it, mate!
I’m being a bit harsh. It was enjoyable enough, went through all the buddy sports movie hoops, tried for a surprise plot twist that was visible from the moon, had a couple of nice performances and some very well drawn characters, and one or two genuinely well shot tense bits of cinema. The script wasn’t too bad, though I think it was trying a bit too hard to play against audience expectations, so that it lead to the occasional bit of nonsense. For example, one guy splits up with his girlfriend, takes a picture of them together out of its frame, then dumps the picture and puts the frame in his bag. Cute. But why take the frame? What’s so special about it? There’s a terribly clever tactical “meta-game” play by two of the characters, intended to throw some other people off their game, that really makes no sense at all (though it seems to work well enough)… and now I’m quibbling again. I enjoyed it. It was professional enough for people to enjoy, while amateurish enough to see bits that worked and didn’t work, and try and learn from them.
The Spanish Prisoner
I saw the end of this on TV (after watching the end of a truly amazing ballet on ABC, something that was alternately bizarre, stupid, and breathtaking, but always compelling. No idea what it was called.) And once again, the end makes no sense. How did all those people get on the boat at the end? Were they playing him *that well*? No, I think it was just a gratuitous twist with no real sense of how it might have been set up. I’d appreciate any sensible alternatives from Mamet fans.
Bring It On
Cute, well written characters, well acted, and with perv-value set to “creepy as hell”. Like stickmen – settle down – it didn’t concentrate so much on the “sport” as the characters, and “Bring It On” did it better. The brother-sister interactions rang wonderfully true. I could take or leave the cheerleading itself. The story was rather more interesting that I had expected, not the old sport-buddy-movie, but rather the failure-redemption ploy.
Lord Of The Rings
Woo-hoo! I did it! 7 tickets at La Premiere, Fox Studios, for the 26 December 8:00pm session of Lord Of The Rings. Allocated seating, so no need to queue for ages, and it comes with luxury seating, free drinks & popcorn, etc. My joy is complete. Now… who to invite. Lets see (counts on fingers) – me, Anna, Ted, Keri, Chris, Amanda, Andrea… yup, that sounds about right! And it saves mightily on Christmas presents too.
Once again – woo hoo! The joy is only alloyed by the knowledge that Donncha has gotten into the advanced premiere on Wednesday, ’cause his girlfriend works at a publicity company of some description. Buggah! On the other hand – www.rottentomatoes.com now has 19 reviews of which only one is negative, making it – FRESH!