I'm a Bobcat fan from way back, so I'll probably want to go see this movie, which he wrote and directed, if it actually gets released to theaters. After which, there will probably be Congressional hearings.

I saw X-Men: First Class on Saturday, and I know some other reviewers don't agree, but I thought it was the best superhero movie I've seen in a long time. I've not seen any of director Matthew Vaughn's other movies, but on the strength of this one, I think I'll have to. It's that good.

It was well-written too, which is a bit of a surprise since there are six credited writers, which is usually a very bad sign. Instead, the movie gives us a pretty good origin story for the X-Men as an organization.

Most superhero stories are escapist fun at a very basic level, and First Class delivers, but as with many of the best superhero comics, there's a strong moral element. Some people complain that comic characters are too simple, but that misses the point. The characters in a story like this are simplified to make their moral choices clearer.

Charles Xavier is a mutant raised in a good home. He's smart, wealthy, and in possession of a telepathic power with few downsides. He looks completely like a normal human and wants to get along with them.

Hank McCoy's beastly mutation has its advantages, but he's also noticeably deformed. He can hide it with the right clothes, but it makes him feel like an outcast. Charles's adopted sister Raven, later to become Mystique, also feels like an outcast. Her power of disguise allows her to hide herself perfectly, but she resents the need to use it.

Then there's Erik Lehnsherr, a.k.a. Magneto, who looks like a normal human. However, as a Jewish child in the heart of Nazi germany, he saw the cruelty that humans could inflict on those who were different. He hides now, but he thinks that a Nazi-like genocide of mutants is inevitable, unless the mutants destroy humanity first.

Please don't let me give you the idea that First Class is yet another show about teen angst over "being different." (I mean, Claire from Heroes was indestructible, and she whined about it. Sheesh.) There's more to the story than just a morality play, including lots of fun with the various mutant powers. And the whole story eventually winds up at the Cuban missile crisis, which turns out to be instigated by a Bond-esque supervillain millionaire named Sebastian Shaw.

The film is visually impressive and at times beautiful. The special effects are impressive, yet they're clear and clean, and about as realistic as you could expect from a superhero movie. They support the story rather than overwhelming our ability to understand it. In one of the key scenes that illustrates their relationship, Charles helps Erik learn to maximize his magnetic powers, which he tests by trying to move an enormous object in the distance. Rather than yet another special effects set piece, the distant motion is quiet and understated. It's not what the scene is about.

All in all, X-Men: First Class is familiar fare, but it's a decent story, well-told, filled with interesting characters and impressive sights.

I went to see the movie Skyline yesterday.

I should have known better. The distributor has been advertising it like crazy, but as the release date approached, they didn't preview it for movie critics. That usually means they're trying to hide how much their movie sucks. And with a Metacritic score of 28 and 10% on the Tomatometer, the signs were not promising. Still, there was something about it...I wanted to see for myself. That turned out to be a mistake.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

Well, the Academy Awards were last night, and I'm sure all the trendy ironic folks will be making the usual comments about Hollywood self-congratulation, but I mostly enjoyed it. I like movies, and I think good filmmaking deserves to be honored.

I do have one nit to pick, however, with the movie montage they showed as part of their salute to horror movies. Less than halfway through it, I noticed that they were showing a lot of scenes from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. And then I noticed that they kept coming back to Psycho and The Exorcist and the Elm Street series and I started wondering... Was the Academy's horror montage put together by people who didn't really know much about horror films?

I think so. I'm hardly a scholar of horror films, and I haven't gone over the montage in slow motion, so maybe a missed a few, but it seems like the anonymous editors of this montage certainly left out a lot of the horror genre.

To start with, the only zombies I saw were from maybe a one-second clip of Romero's Night of the Living Dead. There's a huge sub-genre of zombie films that they completely missed. They didn't even include Dawn of the Dead, or Return of the Living Dead or Re-Animator, let alone modern takes like 28 Days Later or Shaun of the Dead.

It's a little shocking. I mean, I can understand how they might leave out horror specialist films like Videodrome or  C.H.U.D., but where were Scanners and Invasion of the Body Snatchers? How about The Thing? The Howling? The Dead Zone? Altered States? Any version of The Fly?

Where were Fright Night and Arachnophobia, and the Twilight Zone movie? What about Creepshow and Pumpkinhead and Near Dark? Where were Seven, and Final Destination, and The Lost Boys? Why didn't we see any piece of the incredible Phantasm series?

It's a truism that Hollywood has always slighted horror films, but last night they managed the amazing feat of slighting horror films in the middle of a montage honoring horror films...

And for fuck's sake, how the hell do you leave out Evil Dead?

I saw Avatar yesterday, and it was a pretty darned good movie. If you think you might like this kind of thing, just go see it.

As with James Cameron's earlier film Titanic, the star of this film is the magnificent setting and the way it is presented. The lush world of Pandora is beautiful, the CGI that creates the aliens is every bit as good as everyone else says, and the 3D unobtrusively helps you understand the the complex action in the forest scenery.

The characters and the plot are simple and relatively straightforward. For some reason, this bothers some people. They point to the thin characterization and simple plot as if it were some kind of terrible failing, and they're proud of themselves for having seen past the special effects, which is a silly attitude. Seeing past the special effects in Avatar is like seeing past the songs in Rent.

Another thing that bothers some people about Avatar is the politics of it all. For example, here's Peter Suderman at Reason's Hit & Run blog:

And the Na'vi, the movie's marble-skinned alien natives, are easily the most convincing humanoids ever to leap forth from a Hollywood effects house's CGI server-farm -- that is, at least in terms of the way they look and move. The realism stops, however, every time they open their mouths and reveal themselves to be crude, one-dimensional native stereotypes: instinctive and animalistic purveyors of cheap mysticism and nature worship. 

So despite its genuinely impressive technical innovations, Avatar isn't much a movie: Instead, Cameron's cooked up a derivative, overlong pastiche of anti-corporate clichés and quasi-mystical eco-nonsense. It's not that the film's politics make it bad, it's that even if you agree, the nearly three-hour onslaught of simplistic moralizing leaves no room for interesting twists or ambiguity in the story or characters: corporations are bad, scientists are good, natives are pure, harmony with nature is the ultimate ideal...

Good grief. A "three-hour onslaught of simplistic moralizing"? There's maybe three minutes of political content scattered throughout the whole movie. Admittedly, some of it is pretty clunky---references to pre-emptive strikes, shock and awe, and fighting terror with terror---but it all goes by in a few seconds. Maybe James Cameron was trying to send me a message, but so what? I was busy enjoying the rest of the movie.

I think Suderman must have gone into this movie with an attitude, because he sure missed a lot. For one thing, the native people's connection to nature isn't just some kind of "cheap mysticism" or "quasi-mystical eco-nonsense." The Na'vi are connected to nature for a reason. Anybody who's familiar with science fiction literature will see it coming, but it's also spelled out quite clearly in the movie.

Also, Suderman and other right-wing critics seem to miss the rather important fact that the bad guys are stealing from the natives and destroying the places where they live, just like any corporation using eminent domain to take someone's land. A libertarian shouldn't have any problem with the natives trying to prevent that.

On the other hand, Roger Ebert says it has an anti-war message, apparently missing the fact that the Na'vi good guys have plenty of weapons and don't mind fighting back.

I'm not saying Avatar is pro-war and pro-property rights, but neither is it about anti-corporate mystical eco-nonsense. It's about these people on this planet, and some of them are human and some of them are alien, and...really, it's a big special effects movie. Just go see it and have fun.

I hate it when movie theaters put a message on the screen where they threaten to prosecute us for using a recording device. I understand they want to prevent people from copying movies, and I don't plan on any bootlegging, but I don't like doing business with places that treat me like a criminal.

Since a taping incident doesn't hurt a theater directly very much, I wondered if the message was just a requirement passed along from the distributor. Or were they really serious?

At the Muvico theater in Rosemont, Illinois, they're apparently serious about it. Viciously and stupidly serious, as 22-year old Samantha Tumpach found out last weekend:

Taping three minutes of "Twilight: New Moon" during a visit to a Rosemont movie theater landed Samantha Tumpach in a jail cell for two nights.

Now, the 22-year-old Chicago woman faces up to three years in prison after being charged with a rarely invoked felony designed to prevent movie patrons from recording hot new movies and selling bootleg copies.

But Tumpach insisted Wednesday that's not what she was doing -- she was actually taping parts of her sister's surprise birthday party celebrated at the Muvico Theater in Rosemont.

...

Managers contacted police, who examined the small digital camera, which also records video segments, Cmdr. Frank Siciliano said. Officers found that Tumpach had taped "two very short segments" of the movie -- no more than four minutes total, he said.

Tumpach was arrested after theater managers insisted on pressing charges, he said.

I understand the need to protect intellectual property, but this is ridiculous. Copyright is usually a matter of civil law, so taking it to the level of felony criminal charges should only be necessary to punish blatant piracy of intellectual property such as a DVD forgery operation.

It's also pretty asinine of the theater management to press charges in a case like this. I'm guessing that Ms Tumpach and her friends won't spending any more money at Muvico in Rosemont. Neither will lots of other people If this story gets around.

FYI, here's the Muvico contact page.

(Hat tip: Consumerist via Balko)

Update: Here's my email to Muvico:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I've always been disturbed by the now-common warnings against using a recording device in theaters. I understand why recording is wrong, but I don't appreciate spending good money in your establishment for tickets and snacks, and then being treated like a potential criminal.

Now I read in the Chicago Sun-Times that the Muvico I go to in Rosemont is pressing charges against a young lady for recording  a few minutes of the latest Twilight movie while playing around with a cheap little camera. That's just crazy. Your theater manager has no sense of proportion---What's next? Prosecuting customers for littering if they don't throw away their empty popcorn buckets?

I guess he (or she) also has no sense of the value of customers to the theater business. There are lots of other theater choices in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. I don't have to go to Muvico, and I don't think I will.

-- Mark Draughn

I think I probably have to see this:

Christian Bale, star of the latest Batman movie and the next Terminator movie, is accused of assaulting his mother and his sister in an incident at a hotel in London. He's quoted in an AP wire story:

"It's a deeply personal matter," Bale told The Associated Press at a news conference at a luxury hotel in Barcelona. "I would ask you to respect my privacy in the matter."

Yeah, good luck with that.

I just found out the Watchmen trailer is up at Empire Online.

I'm not a super-fan of the comic, but I can understand why some people are. In its day, it must have been the most amazing thing ever. Some of the freshness has worn off now that we've seen its techniques used by more recent graphic novels. Kind of like how the ending of Hamlet---big fight, everybody dies---seems like something we've seen before.

I'm wondering how they'll condense the story to fit a couple of hours. Anybody know if the pirates are still in it?

Check out the trailer at Empire Online.

Those are very important words to remember. Especially since I just noticed that a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still is in post-production for release on December 12.

How cool is that?

Coming this spring, there are some movies I've got to see.

There are several movies I'll probably see, or feel obligated to see.

And there are a few movies I shouldn't see, but I'm tempted anyway.

[No spoilers that you wouldn't get from watching the trailers.]

When your body moves, your brain coordinates the images from your eyes with balance information from your inner ear to give you a consistent picture of the world. This works fine in the natural world, but our modern world presents your brain with situations it's not ready for. On an airplane, your eyes see a perfectly still cabin, but your inner ear can feel the plane pitching and rolling in turbulent air. You experience these conflicting inputs as dizzyness.

If the inputs are severe enough and persistent enough, some low-level function in your brain reaches an unfortunate conclusion. In the natural world, the most likely cause of dizziness is poison, probably from something you ate. The obvious solution is to empty your stomach as quickly as possible. This is why you get airsick.

The same thing can happen in reverse. If you're sitting still on a firm object---say, a seat in a movie theater---but the picture on the screen is moving and jerking around a lot, your brain might conclude that you need to vomit.

Which brings me to the New York monster movie Cloverfield. Like The Blair Witch Project, the whole movie is shot with a handheld camera. However, the characters shooting Blair Witch were supposed to have filmmaking skills. This movie appears to be shot on home video by an amateur named Hud who is documenting his friend Rob's going-away party.

I knew that going in, but I expected that after a few shaky minutes to establish the premise, the film would start to cheat and steady the camera a bit. That never happened. After an hour and a half of what Roger Ebert is calling "Queasy-Cam," I felt a little ill. Would it have ruined the story if Hud had been Rob's professional videographer friend?

Obviously, I had a lot of trouble getting past the camera work. I think the filmmakers wanted to put us in the action and make it real. Instead, the shaky camera work kept breaking me out of the story. It left me detached from the characters.

As others have pointed out, the movie's visual style intentionally evokes a lot of news footage of disasters, especially the events of 9/11. I don't really think it's exploitive. It's just that we've all learned what a major disaster looks like, so that's what our disaster movies have to look like.

In many ways, this movie reminded me of the problem I had with Spielberg's remake of War of the Worlds. Both movies follow the personal struggle of a small group of characters faced with a threat far beyond their ability to handle. So we spend the whole movie watching them run away, while in the background the U.S. Army tries to do something about the problem.

I suppose this is realistic. People caught up in disasters have no sense of the big picture. For most people in the World Trade Center on 9/11, their whole day was about a loud crash followed by an hour of walking down the stairs and away from the building. Terrifying for them, but you wouldn't want to see a movie about it.

That's the biggest problem with Cloverfield. The main conflict is this incredible battle between the monster and military. Someone somewhere is commanding the increasingly desperate attacks against the creature while simultaneously coordinating the evacuation of the city.

Meanwhile, we're stuck watching a very long subplot.

This was the best action movie I've seen in a long time.

I was not a fan of the Transformers TV series (or comic book, or toy line), so I can't tell you if the movie is faithful to the franchise. From what I understand, the mythos is pretty confused and has changed many times, so the movie probably isn't far off from whatever Transformers fans are expecting.

In the first few minutes of the Transformers movie (I'm not revealing anything that's not in the trailer) an evil Decepticon attacks an American airbase in Qatar. It shows up looking like a helicopter, but then it does that crazy transforming thing and becomes a giant robot, which immediately starts blowing stuff up.

Handled poorly, a scene like that could have been pretty dumb, but the movie treats it perfectly. The transformer is big and fast and loud, a dangerously advanced war machine dealing out overwhelming violence in order to accomplish its mission.

In a way, the filmmakers faced the same challenges as the makers of the 1998 American version of Godzilla: Take a silly but familiar concept and make it real. Godzilla accomplished that for the first 20 minutes and then squandered its credibility with ridiculous action scenes and unnecessary subplots.

Transformers never falters that way. The robots could have been too brightly colored and toy-like, or they could have been too gritty and violent, but the filmmakers managed a fine balancing act. The Autobots may have quirky personalities and disguise themselves as General Motors products, but they are filmed so magnificently and their battles are so incredible that they've earned the right to be a little ridiculous. When Optimus Prime talks about "the right of all sentient life to be free," my first reaction was not to think it was corny, but to be thankful his personal philosophy kept him on our side.

I was pleasantly surprised that this movie was made with a good grasp of modern warfare. I'm sure the details are wrong, but the concepts seem right. In Godzilla the good guys tried to kill the giant monster by shooting Sidewinder anti-aircraft missiles at it. Nobody makes a mistake like that in this movie.

For an even worse example of bad military sci-fi, there's 1997's Starship Troopers. Its soldiers postured endlessly about being brave and tough and facing death, no doubt because they had to—they'd been sent on a mission to attack their insectoid enemy without weapons powerful enough to kill a bug, armor tough enough to stop a bug, or any vehicles for escaping from the bugs. Also, they had to defend a bunker that looked like an old frontier fortress, with no firing slits and no roof to prevent the enemy from climbing in. They were supposed to be science fiction soldiers of the future, but any modern army could have swept them from the battlefield with little effort...or just ignored them.

The soldiers in Transformers, on the other hand, are fighting according to something resembling modern combined arms doctrine. They may be desperate and caught up in a battle that they weren't prepared for, but when they encounter a superior enemy force, they do the right thing and call for air support.

Most of the characters feel like part of the larger mythos of the series, but the movie thankfully doesn't waste much time filling in the details. You find out everything about the characters that you need to know, and the rest is story.

Acting in a big-budget action flick is often a thankless task, but there are a few notable performances. John Turturro and Jon Voight turn in great performances as Agent Simmons and Defense Secretary John Keller, but that's no surprise. Josh Duhamel plays Sergeant Lennox with a captivating cool intensity—he may be this generation's Michael Biehn.

Shia LaBeouf resists playing Sam Witwicky, the teenage boy at the heart of it all, as an outrageous mega-nerd and settles for a more rounded portrayal of a teenager who is often uncool but sometimes also brave. Kevin Dunn and Julie White are hilarious as his parents.

The leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime, is voiced by Peter Cullen, who has been the voice of Optimus Prime since the 1980's. He's also the voice of Eeyore in all the recent Pooh movies and he's been in about 100 other things. He was the voice of K.A.R.R. (if you don't know, I'm not explaining), and I think he did the voice of the alien in the original Predator.

This is an exhilarating movie about a fun idea. I'll be seeing it again real soon.

Now that 24 is over, what will we do for mindless action?

This.

I saw the movie 300 last night. I knew it had been produced by some of the same people who made Sin City, and the previews showed it clearly applied a similarly gritty, visceral visual style to the violence. That worried me.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind violence in films—heck, I love a good action movie—but there has to be more to the film than blood and gore. If the movie is not otherwise enjoyable, the addition of a few dozen quality kills will not make it any better. Pointlessly brutal cinematic violence just makes a movie more tiring.

Fortunately, 300 was not like that at all. It was exciting and beautiful and awe-inspiring and at times even funny. It was the the best kind of movie experience: I enjoyed it when I watched it, and I kept thinking about it afterwards.

300 is based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, so it has more than a few fantastic elements. The Persians did not have monsters fighting for their side, for example, and many of the meetings between characters were probably made up. Also, Spartan hoplites probably wore armor instead of fighting bare-chested.

I've since read a little about the battle at Thermopylae, however, and I think the movie got most of the important parts right, especially the advantages that accrue to well-trained soldiers fighting on well-chosen ground.

Probably the biggest deviation from history is that the Spartans in the movie are fighting all alone. (Other Greek soldiers are shown, and more are alluded to, but they rarely appear.) Throughout most of the real battle, the Spartans were accompanied by thousands of other soldiers, and the Thebans and Thespians stayed to the end. Nevertheless, the 300 Spartans were the point of the spear.

Some reviewers have felt the need to discuss the political meaning of the film, especially its West-v.s.-East conflict, the depiction of the Persians, and how it all relates to the war in Iraq. That strike me as a waste of time. The events in the film took place long before the founding of Christianity or Islam, between civilizations that have all but vanished, leaving behind only some important ideas and some great stories. Do yourself a favor and don't worry about it.

As this movie preview ended, I realized that my mouth was literally just hanging open in dumbfounded amazement.

You've never seen anything like this.

(Hat tip: Sour N Sweet)

Underdog is Here!

And I'm so there.

When I was a child, I used to watch that show when I could work up the nerve. The villain's evil schemes just creeped me out, and the level of peril for the hero and Polly were far too intense for me to bear.

I suspect it will seem more tame now.

(Hat tip: Lammers)

I saw Ghost Rider this weekend. There are spoilers coming after the jump...

Ethne at Pole Dancing in the Dark has some Halloween Helpful Hints that we should all learn for our safety.

Over at Reason they've started a discussion about how bad Disney live action movies were before Mike Eisner took over. (Three words: Apple, Dumpling, Gang.)

In a rebuttal, commenter Tom Crick mentioned the incredible Dexter Riley series. These three Disney movies starred Kurt Russell as a college student who was the subject of a series of scientific mishaps. In The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes Dexter accidentally mixes water and a computer and the resulting mess turns him into a human computer that knows everything. Next, in Now You See Him, Now You Don't he and the other kids accidentally invent a chemical which can turn people invisible. Finally, in The Strongest Man in the World they invent a chemical that, well, you get the idea. I have fond memories of the first two, and the third one was OK, but after invisibility, strength just didn't seem like such a big deal.

I'm tempted to order the DVDs just to see them again, but I'm not sure that's a good idea. These movies all came out before Star Wars set a new standard for movie effects, and even some of the effects in Star Wars look bad these days compared to the wonders of digital film-making. Also, I'm just not a kid anymore. If I see these movies again as an adult, I'm afraid the new experience will erase the magical memories.

This got me thinking about films I loved as a kid that I dare not see again for fear of ruining the magic.

Movies like these:

• The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
• Now You See Him, Now You Don't
• The Strongest Man in the World
• The awesome Escape to Witch Mountain. That ending was amazing. I didn't see it coming, but it explained everything. Damn that was cool!
• The People. I caught this on television late one night. It's about a teacher who visits a small town where there's something a little unusual about the children. I'm afraid I'll just giggle at William Shatner, but at the time I thought it was a nice understated performance. It's a low-budget, but it's warm and moving and magical.
• The Love Bug
• Herbie Rides Again. All other sequels must be destroyed!
• Tom Sawyer the musical from 1973.

There have got to be others. I'm not talking about classic movies like The Absent-Minded Professor, which I'm sure will hold up just fine, or even That Darn Cat! which might not hold up but won't be so bad it's embarassing. I'm talking about movies that will probably suck if I see them again, but I liked them too much to take that chance.

Anybody else out there have movies like that?