Tonight, Liz and I had a date night where we actually went out to the movies.
I’ve come to realize that I’m either getting older, or that I’ve always been a misanthropic curmudgeon. And that movie theaters stopped being a source of magic and wonder, and are simply avenues where someone can kick my chair in the dark.
Liz was watching Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and had paused the movie. On walking in, this is what I saw on the TV.
It reminded me of Liz “alternative title” for the moving: the Stockholm Syndrome Musical.
“Did you lose your mind all of a sudden, or was it a slow, gradual process?”
The longer I stared, the more I felt like I had found myself in some other dimension. These may all be “Blockbuster movies,” but they were all just alien to me.
As I was watching this video and feeling like I was kneeling on the carpet in my parents’ living room, something struck me as kind of odd. I was looking at the background, at where the band was recording this video.
The kicker of all this is, while Yoda and ET exist in the same universe, that very same universe is one where Star Wars exists also as a fictional movie, with its own merchandise (and Halloween masks). Which kind of makes my head spin around, in a fun way.
I was really taken with “The Cabin in the Woods” the first time I saw it. I’m a fan of Joss Whedon’s writing, and though I’m not much into horror movies… this one was really fun.
While I was watching the second movie (The Lost World: Jurassic Park), I noticed something really peculiar. Towards the end of the movie, when a bus is being attacked by the T-Rex… there’s a brief shot of the interior of a video rental store.
Terry Gilliam, ex-Monty Pythoner and maker of awesome movies, has a new film out – The Zero Theorem. The main storyline seems to center on the nature of human existence, and the backdrop is surreal – a very Gilliam-esque trailer, if there ever was one.
“Maybe you wonder how a Jewish girl from Des Moines got Jesus Christ tattooed on her three times: ascending on one thigh, crucified on the other, and conducting a miniature apocalypse beneath the right shoulder.”
I recognized Kumar Pallana from his role in the movie The Royal Tenenbaums, and learned he had appearances in other Wes Anderson films. But I had no idea about the remarkable and remarkably rich life Pallana led, prior to him being in films.
As a kid growing up in the 80’s with cable television, Time Bandits is one of those films that seemed to always be playing. I watched it so many times, there are still sections of the film that I feel I could quote verbatim, some 25+ years later.
Adam B. Vary has written a fantastic article on how the movie came to be, entitled “Something Terrible Has Happened Here”: The Crazy Story Of How “Clue” Went From Forgotten Flop To Cult Triumph. He tracks down the movie’s director, Jonathan Lynn, and gets a lot of the wonderful details and behind-the-scenes stories.
A week or so ago, the guys at RIPT had a t-shirt based on the movie Legend. They linked to a behind-the-scenes commentary video focusing on Tim Curry’s character, Darkness, and the crazy makeup/props involved.
I know very little about the film Gravity, but happened to see this trailer posted on Facebook… and man, it’s a pretty great teaser. I’ve re-watched this a few times now.