Ever since the whole baby thing, my movie-viewing habits have changed drastically. No more hitting up LECINEMAZ once a week, if not more. I think the last movie I saw in the theatre for is Transformers. Yikes. Instead, I find myself continually behind the loop as I wait for the DVD (well, Blu-Ray) version; thankfully, the modern movie industry has turned the 6-9 month turnaround between theatre to home into something like three months instead. Anyhow, I found myself too busy with work shit to watch movies during the week, and on my three-at-a-time plan, I watched one movie each night over the weekend. Some capsule comments below:
Superbad: Was kind of prepared, but not really, for how raunchy the dialogue was. It was damn funny at times, but at a whole crazier speed than stuff like Knocked Up or 40-Year-Old Virgin. I also thought the whole McLovin deal looked stupid in trailers, but it actually worked for me once I saw it. Also, bonus for the random 2 minutes of Pineapple Express. Seeing Harry Osborn talk about a cross-joint (“the apex of the vortex of joint engineering) designed by the guy who did the Golden Gate Bridge.
Rescue Dawn: I actually realized that I never seen any part of Werner Herzog’s catalog. I’ve heard of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but otherwise, I only know him as “that guy who uses Klaus Kinski a lot and did that movie about that guy with the grizzlies.” Rescue Dawn ends up to be a pretty spiffy prison escape movie, but in TEH NAM. The transfer was pretty nice, as the green leaves and crazy colors of (Thailand) TEH NAM jump out at you. One thing that I haven’t seen many reviews comment on (then again, I didn’t read a lot of reviews): I found some of the dastardly Laotians really funny. I’m not sure if I’m being insensitive, or if they’re supposed to be somewhat absurd humor breaks to relieve the tension, but by golly, I found them funny. Like the guy that looks like a young Itagaki, or the dude who just keeps on backflipping, or the dwarf. Also, Batman is in it.
Atonement: Yup, pretty typical Miramax/Weinstein/Merchant-Ivory period fodder for Oscar grabs. Keira is still gorgeous, and the only other thing I’ve seen McAvoy in was Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe (no Last King of Scotland for me yet), and he was certainly an improvement over that. Solidly crafted, if a bit unremarkable for most of the running time. There’s a pretty awesome tracking shot in Dunkirk. There’s a specific aspect to the ending that is much better executed in the book (didn’t want to spoil things); if anything, it’s a clear difference of the sorts of narrative devices that a book uses over a movie. This is a pretty clear “adaptation of main stuff” type of deal, which can be good or bad depending on whether you think several pages of a girl spinning around on the field should be condensed into a three minute scene or not.
On a same, but different subject, I used to work with a guy that really liked fonts. At the time, I didn’t really give a shit about them. But I read some comment online about this book, and how it’s important that people who work in the publishing biz appreciate the shape and craft of the text being used to express their ideas. It’s actually a pretty good read, to me, at least.
In that vein, this website I’ve never heard of recently did a mini-compilation of people using typography and dialogue to illustrate a scene from a movie. Rather than plagiarize the feature, I’ll just show a couple below, and you can look at the rest on your own.
From my favorite Coen bros movie (I haven’t seen No Country For Old Men yet though). I actually kind of like the scene with Jesus better, but I think this scene below is a better use of the whole typography motif:
From Fight Club, just because I like it, and there’s some clever stuff with font choice, positioning, and random icons/art:
Okay, I’m going to hit the sack so that I can wake up and download some pieces of awesome later.
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