godthedog

he and liz taylor in 'cat on a hot tin roof' make pretty much the most impossibly good-looking couple you could ever hope to see.

'small time crooks'...really? i don't think i've even thought about that movie in 8 years. are we going to do 1st-3rd place voting on these, once everybody's picks are in?

my girlfriend could probably beat me up. she's at the gym 4 times a week doing weightlifting, swimming, and spinning. the extent of my exercise is that i walk home from campus everyday, which is about a mile.

breaking this motherfucker down CE-style: i don't know anybody who's given that line, as i don't know anybody who felt the need to explain why it was so successful if it was a bad movie. bad movies make shitloads of money all the time, especially overseas. even 'waterworld' was able to do not-that-bad thanks to its overseas business. the theatrical success of 'pulp fiction' baffles me a lot more than the record-breaking success of 'titanic', because it was one of those spectacle productions with tons of money behind it that's built to get big numbers. the whole marketing/story genius of 'titanic' (which i'm surprised no one has tried to duplicate) was by mixing equal parts 'jurassic park'-style action spectacular and girly melodramatic romance between 2 astonishingly good-looking people. guys wanted to see the boat sink, ladies wanted to see the love story. critical reviews are almost as subject to hype and social factors as audiences. lots of hype and a late-in-the-year release always help. the movie which had won the most oscars up to that point was 'ben hur', which is solely considered "great" by people who aren't paying attention because they're thinking of the chariot race. 'ben hur' was a classic example of inflated importance. oscars are not a good gauge for anything, especially if you're going by quantity--'titanic' was only up for so many because it had a lot of bells and whistles attached to it. the hole created by the vastness of this understatement is big enough to drive the whole movie through. the love story was supposed to be the durable meat that held the special effects together and enabled the movie to stand the test of time. it failed horribly. the characters are uniformly awful, ripped from bad 19th-century stage melodrama. the dialogue is abysmal. these are things that bother me about a movie.

i just threw up in my mouth a little.

as this pathetically limps to the finish, enough time has probably elapsed that i can legally go, and even if not i doubt anybody will pick it. so for my last pick, i take Pickup on South Street if you love to see women get beaten up and shot, this is the movie for you. i was lacking some noir on my list, and this one is pulpy and delicious. richard widmark makes a great antihero. tons of goofy hard-boiled fun, but thelma ritter gives it an emotional center really pushes it into greatness. hers is one of my favorite characters in any movie.

yes, he was. i love that spindly thing he does with his inhumanly long fingers. he would make a badass guitar player. the whole episode last night was pretty good in an "oh my god did they really show that on network TV?" kind of way. mary harron's last week was kind of legit good.

The Awful Truth i'm not generally a fan of the screwball comedy genre--a lot of times they feel excessively choreographed or they try too hard--but this is totally effortless anarchy. not much of a plot to care about, as it's mostly just a string of comic set pieces for cary grant & irene dunne to make each other look ridiculous, and it's not a coincidence that this was directed by leo mccarey (of "duck soup" fame). you get the sense at any minute that the whole movie will fall apart and stop making any sense, but it never quite happens. cary grant is amazing. i didn't know it was possible for someone to make me laugh so hard just by using his eyebrows.

i cannot figure out why i still like ween so much. this seems like something i should've grown out of, in the same vein of nine inch nails, but i just can't help it. i picked up 'la cucaracha' this weekend, and i still find myself laughing at lines like "she's gonna be my cock professor, studying my dick/she's gonna get her master's degree in fucking me!" that doesn't even rhyme the way it should. half the songs on that album don't even rhyme, and i still find it all not just funny but endearing. what is wrong with me.

yeah, that's it, though i never saw them until i moved to pittsburgh. in new york i don't think it would be a big deal at all, because there's fucked up shit blocking the roads every day of the year and every day it's something different. "oh no, people on bikes." "oh no, a street fair." "oh no, a building being evacuated from a bomb threat." "oh no, elephants." and so on. i love smoking bans in bars. it's so very nice to come home from a crowded bar and not have to change my clothes for their lingering odor making me want to vomit. smokers are hard-asses, they can walk forty feet and stand under some awning if they want a fix.

those people make me glad that critical mass exists, and i hate critical mass.

the way the 'dark knight' hype machine is going, you may not need to wait very long.

i feel like a separate thread needs to be started for batman fantasy booking.

did somebody suddenly just see 'citizen kane' for the first time?

burton has certain things he really likes to do, and sometimes he gets to direct scripts that are really good. those 2 things seldom have anything to do with each other. he can turn a good script into a great movie, but with so-so or bad material he just focuses on the self-indulgent burtonesque things (costumes, set design, tone, danny elfman music, etc.), and it doesn't really help. 'batman 89' had a great look, awesome music, and exactly the right dark, menacing, larger-than-life tone. it's what made people want to see more batman. it also had cardboard characters and a shitty story that made no sense. based on his track record, i think burton deserves credit for all those things. not only would 'batman: TAS' have never happened were it not for the movie--even if it did, it wouldn't have been nearly as good, because it basically took all the great aesthetic things from burton and added good characters & interesting stories.

looks like i'm free to pick. Notorious got my favorite color hitchcock AND my favorite black-and-white hitchcock. this, for me at least, is the peak of the hollywood studio system's powers in the 40s.

'arrested development' all the way. it was never uneven the way 'the office' is, and 'the office' at its best still doesn't come close to stuff like, "they're not cops, look how hot they are!" i'd like to see a match-up between 'arrested development' and mst3k.

this has been in my head all day today.

harry lime in 'the third man'.

but his plan couldn't have worked otherwise, cause it was only by getting caught that he was able to tell batman where rachel & dent were. his line was something like, "i'm going to tell you where they are. and that's the point."

i just finished watching that today. the french have this weird thing about drawing out tense moments as long as possible with no music. i also found the ending really funny. is that bad?

That's actually a really cool idea. I mean, obviously not going to be as gory as Saw is.. but just as sinister and twisted.. that would be pretty interesting. but that's pretty much already what the joker did--elaborately constructed booby-traps designed to force people into impossible decisions. it was already stretching the limits of plausibility how far ahead of everybody else he was thinking (getting caught on purpose with an escape plan, the sheer amount of architecture he had to rig with explosives, etc.). i mean...maybe you can write the riddler to be smarter and more rube goldbergian than that, but i don't know if you would really want to.

we all appreciate the announcement that there were about to be spoiler tags, as well as the helpful way you made clear the function they're intended to perform. it would've been very confusing otherwise.

i think they should stay away from 'knightfall'. people seem to be gravitating toward that because it showed most clearly that batman could be vulnerable, but nolan is progressively pushing away from the standard "put the hero and/or the ones he loves in danger" stuff in really clever ways. 'knightfall', to me, would be the batman equivalent of the "hey, they kidnapped/hurt/killed professor x" story in the x-men franchise or the "hey, they kidnapped mary jane YET AGAIN" story in spider-man. also, am i the only one who thinks bane is kind of a shitty, one-dimensional villain?

i'm pretty sure they would be okay with another 3-year gap, considering it was 3 years between the first one & this one. something else ledger isn't really getting credit for is that he's a pretty big dude with an impressive physical presence...over 6 feet tall and reasonably well built, like he could take on someone of christian bale's size in a fight. and he downplayed that completely, almost like he was inhabiting another body where he could make himself seem smaller and less imposing. i don't think he ever stood up straight while he was on camera. his posture and his shoulders were always slumped or slanted. that's just some really good control over how he uses his body, to create a consistent impression like that.