Movies Lately

So here’s what I’ve seen in the past couple weeks, in no particular order:

  • Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow - So I think there was some kind of plot, because why else would they have stuck all those people in front of the CGI robots? Quite a mistake - the robots, and the associated visual pastiche of early-to-Golden Age styles, were much more interesting than the tributes to time-honored wooden archetypes. Brave Manly Pilot, Superficially Feisty Yet Ultimately Helpless Non-Technically-Oriented Heroine, and Genius Engineer Sidekick, blah-de-blah, whatever, costuming. A good date movie for nerds, because you can play Spot the Reference; I was disappointed not to hear the Wilhelm.
    And for those of you who’ve seen it: what was up with the villainess costume? I found it incongruous and distracting - particularly the cape - perhaps it was some sort of Batman thing but it didn’t seem to fit.
  • Outfoxed - a little uneven, but overall, how depressing! The proposed solution was to badger the FCC, which left me feeling bleak and empty - I generally favor the ruthless subjugation of commercial speech to consumer fraud protections, but I don’t think “fair and balanced” is in quite the same class of claims as “100% juice” or “not tested on animals”.
    New Campaign Friend M. emerged from the theater bent on creating a liberal equivalent, which is also depressing. What I hate about Fox News is that otherwise clever people will grant it a kind of epistimologic privilege it clearly hasn’t earned. Whether it’s because people think the sum of all lies is truth, or what, I don’t know, but I’m interested in eliminating this kind of bullshit credulity, not expanding it. It’s fundamentally a cultural problem. Bleah.
  • Hero - Does anyone know the number of basic color words in Chinese? The colored scenes were remarkably coincedent with the approved sequence for adding color words to languages. In the absence of a better reason for not having fight sequences in orange and purple, I’m sticking to my friend Mr. Whorf.
  • Shaun of the Dead - made me puke. Literally. I had to leave the theater at the end of the first act* and hang out in the lobby/bathroom with irritating kids and ushers. The movie could’ve been very cute, if only it had done more to distinguish itself from a mysterious tummy bug. Such wasted potential!

* Note that this was before the “zombie gore” set in. I may be squeamish, and sitting in the front row certainly didn’t help (you can’t even see the whole screen at once that far forward, why do they even put seats there?), but I’m not quite that sensitive. Also: Zombie seeking brains.

yami · 13:02 · 28 Sep 2020

One Comment to 'Movies Lately'

  1. Yeah, I recently saw Sky Captain too. Meh.

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