LibraryThing--?/5

I took a look at LibraryThing. It looks "eerily similar" (to appropriate their words) to Goodreads, which I use regularly. Every time I finish a book, I go to Goodreads to rate it. (It's the same for me with movies and Netflix.) I use Goodreads more than I ever used any other social networking site. I don't really want to go through and catalog every book I've read/am reading again.

Redacted (2007)--3/5

In "Redacted," another Iraq War movie that nobody saw, a spiral of violence in Iraq leads to the rape and murder of an Iraqi family by American soldiers. The film is made to look like various formats of "found" footage. Some of the sources are a soldier's video diary, a French documentary, and YouTube.

Since the sixties, Brian De Palma has been playing with voyeurism on film. In "Hi, Mom!," Robert De Niro is an unlovable loser who rents an apartment in order to spy on the tenants living in the building next door. John Travolta, in "Blow Out," becomes obsessed by an audio recording of a possible murder. "Redacted" is the essential De Palma film about voyeurism. Every shot implicates at least two characters: the filmer and the watcher.

Scene/format changes bring up the reasoning behind the person controlling the camera. The French documentarians are furthering their arthouse and anti-American credentials. The soldier's wife on YouTube is getting her thoughts down in the best way she knows.

"The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield" are problematic because they only use one perspective; the movies become more ludicrous the longer they go on. Why would anybody still be filming? "Redacted" solves this problem by changing perspectives and by using (mostly) reasonable set-ups.

Of more interest is the responsibility put on the audience. The footage is from such varying--and sometimes classified--sources, that only a few people could actually be able and allowed to see all of it. Tellingly, in a movie titled "Redacted," none of this footage is actually redacted. This implies that we are caught up in the creation of the story. We are the censors for public consumption. A turning point comes in the film when a member of the squad posts an anonymous YouTube video to tell about the crimes. At this point, something has to be done to appease the public. What follows is a farce that sweeps the crime under the rug.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2003)--2/5

The final (or third, depending on how much you care) Star Wars film is troubling because its first twenty minutes are among the best that the series has to offer.

"Episode III" opens with some battle in the endless Clone Wars. Obi-Wan and Anakin are trying to save Chancellor Palpatine from General Grievous, blah blah blah. All one needs to know is that they're trying to get somewhere to do something. It really is best to tune out any details of the plot because they're either a) dependent on a ten-year-old's intricate knowledge of the backstory or b) completely superfluous.

This whole sequence zips along, the CGI looks fabulous (finally), and it's funny without pandering to children.

It also contains a minutes-long opening shot (always welcome). The shot starts out encompassing the entire battle and slowly zooms in to focus on the two Jedi ships.

Above all, this sequence has a sense of place. The Jedi crash-land in a loading dock of Grievous's ship. They figure out where they need to go on the ship by looking at a map. External views further ground the action. At all times, the audience has a sense of where everything is happening. Later, when the ship accelerates towards the planet, the change in orientation is easily grasped.

The end of the sequence is both thrilling and metaphorical: "Episode III" crashes as spectacularly as the ship. The following twenty minutes--a rehash of the endless talking-head and "landing strut" scenes of "Episode I" and "II."--kill the buzz. The tour-de-force opening sequence only enhances the depression at the realization that "Episode III" is just as disappointing as the other prequels.

(I'll try to stop writing about "Star Wars" now.)

Yes, this is the best picture of the crash in question that I could find.

Reading--5/5

Made with ALA's READ poster generator.

Gremlins 2 (1990)--4/5

This is mostly an excuse to promote the new alternate "Gremlins 2" "film break" scene created by Sacha Feiner. Keep in mind that this was reportedly created in two months for less than $5,000.

"Gremlins 2" is having a minor resurgence in popularity, at least in the orbit of sites that I keep up with. Scott Tobias, of The Onion AV Club, recently wrote about it for his New Cult Canon. About a week later, BoingBoing had a post about the new short.

The AV Club piece made special mention of the "film break" scene, posting the original clip and, for good measure, describing it in great detail. To re-rehash, the gremlins stop the film "Gremlins 2" in such a way that the audience thinks that the film they are watching actually has burned in the projector. Before long, the gremlins make shadow puppets in the light and play another movie. Everything is resolved when Hulk Hogan, sitting in the theater, intimidates them into putting "Gremlins 2" back on.

I quickly realized that I had never before seen this sequence. I first watched "Gremlins 2" on VHS at my grandmother's house. (If you'll believe it, I didn't have a VCR until I was twelve.) This being only the second movie I had watched on her brand new VCR, I was justifiably freaked out by the film breaking. Only, it was magnetic tape, rather than film. According to Wikipedia, an entirely new sequence was created especially for the video release of "Gremlins 2." The VHS version mimics the effect of the tape twisting up and breaking into static. The Gremlins do their shadow puppets over this static. The movie is brought back with the help of a John Wayne impersonator.

Sacha Feiner's new "film break" enhances the newfound timelessness of "Gremlins 2." It's almost a shame that he skipped over DVD in lieu of Video On Demand. Every format shift should come with a new version ad infinitum.

Additionally: I found that Bloglines' search had some satisfactory options for Movie-based RSS feeds. I also went to aintitcool.com and brought their feed into Bloglines.

"From the Earth to the Moon" (1998)--3/5

The Tom Hanks-produced HBO miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon” is a mixed-bag effort to be more than just a twelve-hour riff on “Apollo 13.”

“The Original Wives Club” follows the dull and repetitive lives of some of the astronauts’ wives. Imagine the most obvious scenes from “Apollo 13”—e.g. Marilyn Lovell portentously losing her wedding ring in the shower, people on Earth staring fearfully at a TV. Now imagine those scenes expanded to an hour without the tonic of anything whatsoever involving tension or dynamism.

“Spider” follows the step-by-step design and construction of the Lunar Module, or LEM. Everything about this episode is novel. It makes hard science suspenseful while easily explaining the processes involved. Also, it’s a spot-on period piece of a milieu rarely seen in film—a 60’s engineering firm staffed by devoted, overworked geeks. By the end of the process, the LEM is just as much a character as any human. It’s the offspring of thousands of hours of manpower.

“That’s All There Is” depicts the camaraderie of the crew of Apollo 12. “Kids in The Hall” member Dave Foley gives a winning performance as Alan Bean, the accident-prone Lunar Module Pilot. This hysterical episode shows, with a dash of “The Three Stooges” style, that the Apollo missions weren’t always deadly serious—although they were when it counted. It starts with Bean getting briefly knocked out during atmospheric re-entry by an improperly stowed camera. The rest of the episode moves backwards and forwards through time to show the closeness of the crew on land and in space.

“From the Earth to the Moon” is sporadically brilliant. Just don’t expect anything as consistent as that other Tom Hanks series, “Band of Brothers.”

Redbelt (2008)--2/5

David Mamet's unforgiving writing style brings scenes and actors in "Redbelt" to a dead stop. He seems to script with the aid of a calculator, taking relatively normal-sounding dialogue and multiplying by two. Even worse, dialogue that is naturally repeated is repeated again, resulting in this actual quote: "Who's gonna pay these bills? Who's gonna pay these bills? Are you? Are you? Are you? Are you gonna take care of me?" The whole movie is like this.

The embellishments in the dialogue are nearly matched by the excessive plot elements bearing down on main character Mike. Like the various "Karate Kid" installments, "Redbelt" is about a mixed martial artist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) forced to fight for much more than just his honor. This time, he's not fighting high school bullies. He's fighting (off the top of my head) a corrupt actor, the actor's connected handlers, a turncoat wife, circling loan sharks, and thieving fight promoters. All of these despicable elements, and more, are somehow supposed to be thematically embodied by the guy that Mike fights in the final battle. It's hard to remember who he even fights since it's not anyone that makes an impression anywhere in the movie.

This movie could possibly have been saved if it had any lack of pretension and if it had been called "The Karate Man."



Additionally: I don't understand aggregators. I mean, I think I understand how they work and what they do. But they only diminish my use of the Internet. Bloglines takes all the posts from the blogs I read, formats them differently, and removes most of the pictures. All of the blogs I go to are updated regularly. I go to them regularly. Bloglines isn't saving any time.