IMDB 250 - 3 Idiots (2009)

3 Idiots (2009)

In this Indian film, three college students go on a series of misadventures but are opposed at every turn by the crusty dean who rules with an iron fist.

This movie is awful. If you took "Animal House" and took out everything about it that's good, it would be this movie. "Saved by the Bell" was more self-aware and nuanced. "Lizzy McGuire" was more subtle in its approach to humor. Most cartoons are more smartly written.

Speaking of cartoons, this movie wisely punctuates jokes with cartoon sound effects. Did someone drop their pants? SPROING! The stodgy dean of the college has slightly crossed eyes, a comical under-bite and speaks with a lisp. In case they haven't beat you over the head with the stupid humor enough, the director's overlayed it with loud, overbearing circus music to jam that message into your skull with a jackhammer. You know that Bollywood tradition of always having musical numbers in non-musical movies? They didn't forgo that particular custom. The music and dance sequences are so bad that even cast members of "Glee" would be embarrassed.

OK, so all that amounts to a bad movie. So what? Here's the part that put me over the edge.... it's 3 hours long. Someone somewhere actually thought this dumbed-down frat boy mess needed the David Lean treatment. I don't know how or why this movie got into the IMDB 250, but I don't want to know. I just sat through 3 hours of this tripe and I'm finally done with it.

3/10.
Total Top "250" Movies Seen: 367.

Movie Review: Love

Love (2011)

A lone man in an orbiting space station finds that communications from Earth have stopped. Without human contact, living in complete isolation, he slowly loses touch with reality.

This is very much in the vein of "Moon", "Solaris" (1972), "2001", etc. It's exploration of man's outermost space set against exploration of man's innermost space (the mind). It's a great "genre" in part because these are the two places where absolutely anything is possible. When the protagonist sees a future version of themself or dances with points of light, it can remain perfectly ambiguous to the viewer as to whether it's real or imaginary.

Filmed on an absolutely minimal budget, "Love" was made for about $500,000. Writer/Director William Eubank basically built a space station in his parents' back yard and filmed a single actor inside it. The amazing thing is how great it ends up looking and how well the small budget is concealed.

Mainly "Love" is about isolation (another thing it has in common with some of the above movies). From "Robinson Crusoe" to "Cast Away", it's a theme that's long held a great deal of fascination. But the title isn't ironic. One of the ways to see how central love is to humanity is to observe the effect on an individual when love is completely absent.

Like "Solaris", you should go into this movie only if you're in the mood for a slow pace. The number one criticism I've seen of this movie is that "it's boring" because "nothing happens". But it's a movie that explores total isolation. That's what it's like.

7/10.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Preston and Steve - Rantlers




Dave Matthews Band on Late Night - Christmas Song




Darlene Love on Letterman - Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)

Christmas Sweaters: A Look Back

Every year Late Night counts down the days 'til Christmas with its very own Advent Calendar: "12 Days of Christmas Sweaters".  Every day they give away a different ornate Christmas sweater.

In this last installment they take a look back at what a long, strange trip it's been.

There's a secondary reason I'm posting this. Wait for it.

Who's On First #2

Jimmy Fallon revives the classic "Who's on First" routine with some special guests. What can I say, it's an instant classic.




You can tell I Don't Know isn't happy with his ovation. He's thinking how important timing is in comedy.

TGYWYHSACWAAP #2

The Girl You Wish You Hadn't Started a Conversation With At a Party is back for another "commentary". Obviously Seth still has some growing up to do.

True Facts of Truth

Yesterday Jimmy Fallon unveiled a new segment with Ewan McGregor called "True Facts of Truth".

It appears to be a British service to compete with the Japanese in general weirdness while disseminating fascinating bits of trivia.

IMDB 250 8.5 - The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Of course everyone's already seen this movie so this is all a bit pointless. Everyone agrees it's a good movie so I'll be focusing more on the negative to make it more interesting.

Bi-Villainy

I've always felt that the "Dark Knight" tradition of having two villains per movie is a bad thing. In the first one, the Scarecrow added nothing to the movie - they should have focused completely on Ja Rule.

The second one is much worse. You've got Keith Ledger as the Joker. Every second devoted to Harvey Dent is a waste of everyone's time. He's half good, he's half bad, he's all I don't care. Of course, Ledger's performance is so great, even the scenes focusing on Batman suffer by comparison.

In the Dark Knight Rises, the extra villain is Anne Hathaway's Catwoman. Even though this is the most acceptable instance of the three, at almost 3 hours long, it could have easily been omitted.

Bane

I don't know anything about comic books but it seems to me that in the great pantheon of Batman villains, Bane is quite far down the list. Ok, maybe the Riddler doesn't fit the tone. And, hey, maybe the Penguin is on vacation. But how many rungs down the baddy ladder do you have to go down before you reach Bane.

That aside, does it work in the movie? Kinda. I mean, Bane is a good villain in theory but the voice is ridiculous. Every time he opens his exhaust vent it's like a Batman villain parody. I was trying to nail down what his voice reminds me of and the closest I could come is it's something like Dr. Evil meets Yoda. But then when he's making his sweeping pronouncements to the citizens of Gotham I kept having flashbacks of Theodore Roosevelt. You can't expect me to root against Teddy!

Speaking of speeches. There's one scene where Bane addresses a stadium of people over the PA system. I can't imagine they strived for accuracy in this scene. If you truly combined Bane's own distortion with that of a public address system in a stadium, it would sound like he was taking your McDonald's drive-thru order (McBane?). It wouldn't work. He'd have control of a nuclear bomb but no one to tell it to. In all the years I've watched the Peanuts specials, I never assumed Charlie Brown's mom was threatening nuclear holocaust.

Conclusion

Obviously, "The Dark Knight Rises" is a good movie. Its special effects are phenomenal, great acting, great direction, great writing. Michael Caine gives a particularly strong performance as Alfred. From an IMDB 250 perspective it seems pretty overrated, but it is well worth seeing.

7/10.
Total Top "250" Movies Seen: 366.

Monday-To-Friday Saturday Night Live!

The BET show "What Up With That?" is back with a whole new episode.


-- Spoilers --

The big thing, for me, was the appearance of Jackie Rogers Jr. I'm sure the audience doesn't know who that is, but "Jackie Rogers Jr's $100,000 Jackpot Wad" is an overlooked classic sketch. When Martin Short appeared on Late Night this week, The Roots played the "Jackie Rogers Jr." theme as his walk-on music.

But the big thing, for everyone else, is the fact that Samuel L. Jackson cursed on network television. It's muted on the internet clip, but you can see him say the F word. Then, off-camera he says "Some bull----!" causing Keenan Thompson to reply, "Come on now. That costs money". And, yes, in the live broadcast those words definitely did go out.

I gotta wonder what he's thinking. There's a script and he only would have one line so it's obviously blatant (as opposed to just a flub). And he has to know it's being broadcast live because that's right there IN the title of the show... I'd be surprised if he's not banned from the show because... well... that's going to cost money.

The Wheel of Carpet Samples Rolls On

It's old, it's coasting a bit now but it's still good... The Wheel of Carpet Samples... HOLIDAY EDITION!

Nothing says, "Merry Christmas" to me more than The Wheel of Carpet Samples.



I still get chills every time they announce the Mystery Sample.

Drinkinstein

I'd like to think that my blog can, in some ways, be educational. And so it's extremely tempting to explain the following clip and place it in the proper context. But I will resist that temptation.

Great art stands on its own terms. It should be presented to the viewer unfiltered. It stands above any ability of mine to add or detract.

The observer comes to each piece with their own set of views and experiences, and great art simultaneously reflects and transcends those views and those experiences. The back and forth between the viewer supplying their input and the piece feeding back its own interpretation forms the intimate relationship between the observer and the observed. What kind of a person would I be to try to insert myself into such a relationship?

And so, without further ado, I present to you "Drinkinstein":

IMDB 250 8.4 - In the Name of the Father (1993)

In the Name of the Father (1993)

It is the seventies. MAN, is it the seventies, man. This movie is determined to establish THE HELL out of the fact that it is, indeed, the seventies - by any means necessary. In Ireland, the IRA is waging a war against the British government through riots and bombings. Gerard Conlon (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a, sort of, hippy drifter with little allegiance to either side. But after the bombing of two pub in England, he finds himself and his friends and family accused of creating and planting the bombs.

Under pressure from the government, the police suppress inconvenient evidence and obtain confessions through psychological torture. Several people including Gerard Conlon and his dad are sentenced to rot in prison for years until the case builds that the convictions should be appealed.

Based on a true story, this movie is part courtroom drama, part prison movie and part other courtroom drama. And when Gerard and his dad go to the same prison - even becoming cellmates - it adds a father-son plot-line.

Daniel Day-Lewis is (obviously) extremely good and the script has the gravity of a true story but there's something missing. Every single element of the movie is something we've already seen before in other movies. The police are corrupt baddies, the trial is a mockery of justice, life in prison is cruel and the lawyer who wants the case reopened sure is full of pluck and moxy.

It's a horrible injustice that really happened, and in modern times but, as cinema, it's a real problem when every aspect of a movie is a movie cliche. Drama turns to melodrama and its heavy-handedness in drawing out outrage from the viewer sometimes feels like a Lifetime movie of the week.


5/10.
Total Top "250" Movies Seen: 365.