Watching a movie in the second row, I’ve decided, creates an entirely different dimension to a movie that perhaps the filmmakers did not intend. I am fairly sure, for instance, that the setting of Please Give was not supposed a world where radiation from the sun has caused a race of hugely tall people to take over New York City. Although with all the talk of tanning, microwaves, and larger apartments in the film, perhaps I am onto something here.
(P.S. It’s awesome, go see it.)
It’s Oscar season, and that means everyone starts looking at the Academy’s list to see what they already saw as well. I like to actually do the reverse; focus on the list and see what I didn’t see. There are usually one or two movies that I’ve been meaning to see by the time the list comes out, and this year is no exception. District 9 is at the top of the Netflix queue right now, and I’m hoping to catch Invictus before it leaves theatres. (My Matt Damon fandom is seriously slipping, as I managed to miss The Informant! in theatres last year as well, although I did listen to the episode of This American Life about the real-life incident.)
I’m also slightly amused that a big deal was made about how shifting the number of Best Picture nominations from five to ten would result in more populist movies to make the ballot this year, with the example as the clear lock for a nomination being Star Trek. Oops. So much for trying to predict the future, huh?
Anyway, with the understanding that plans to see those two movies are already in the works… any recommendations on what to see? (Votes for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will be ignored.) Food Inc. and Coraline are the only other ones that immediately leaping to mind so far.
BEST PICTURE
The Blind Side
District 9
For the past few years, I tracked which movies that I saw in the theatre. It was fun to look back and see how many (and what) I’d seen, and this year I decided to take it a step further and add books and graphic novels into the mix, with the help of Goodreads. (I also decided to allow movies I saw on DVD, even though that tally turned out to be just one.)
I ended up tying 2007’s movie tally with 20 films, and amusingly enough that was also the number of novels I read. As for graphic novels… well, let’s just say the final tally was a wee bit higher.
Movies:
Books:
This is more for my own amusement than anything else; these are the movies that I saw in the theatre (versus on DVD, or watched on a plane, or some other non-movie-theatre option) in 2008.
…and then I forgot to keep this listing up to date. But here are some other movies, in no particular order, that (upon retrospect) I did also see in 2008:
There might have been more!
I have a bad tendency to sit on my Netflix movies. Sometimes I go through them quickly—get a DVD in the mail, watch it, send it right back—and that lasts for a few months. And then other times, I end up having the DVD gather a nice layer of dust as it sits on my coffee table.
(I think the record was having Magnolia waiting to be watched for something like nine months. In my weak defense, it’s a very long movie and I wanted to make sure I would have time to watch the entire thing without being interrupted.)
Due to my bad Netflix behavior, about a year ago I switched my membership from three DVDs at a time down to just one. It seemed silly to have so many out all at once if I wasn’t watching them; why pay extra each month, right? Well, back in August Netflix sent me a “bonus disc” for whatever reason. And then, right around the same time, there was some sort of settlement that meant for a month I was suddenly upgraded to an extra disc for a month. So they sent me another one.
Tonight, some four months later, I watched two of three movies and can send them back, which is good since I have to send all three of them back before I can get anything else from Netflix. But there’s just one problem—I cannot figure out what happened to that third DVD.
Oops.
(Hopefully that copy of The Prestige will show up sooner or later. Heh. I could have sworn it was on the coffee table with Mean Girls and Shaun of the Dead. Oh well, I’ll send them back on Monday, and on the bright side they were both excellent. Nothing is more mortifying than having a DVD out for months and then when you finally watch it, the movie stinks.)
Jamie S. Rich, I owe you an apology. You were right and I was wrong.
When you reviewed The Ten you mentioned that you’d never really liked The State, and so I assumed that your blisteringly negative review was because it was a similar sort of comedy that just wasn’t to your taste. I put the movie on my Netflix queue, and it finally made it to the top.
I still have something like 25 minutes to go, and I think I will save my remaining brain cells and send it back partially-unwatched. That was one of the unfunniest, most wince-inducing (but for the wrong reasons), criminal waste of talents I have experienced in a long, long, long time.
Seriously, this movie completely wastes Liev Schreiber, Paul Rudd, Justin Theroux, and Famke Janssen. Isn’t that against the law in several countries? My mind is still reeling over the sheer badness. (Doubly so because I thought the trailer was kind of funny.)
Avoid, avoid, avoid, avoid, avoid. Not even out of idle curiousity’s sake, people.
It’s been a while since I’ve updated about life in the Wild World of Greg. Well, aside from talking about photos or nasty sugar-substitutes.
My work computer bit the dust big time last week. Now I’m on a replacement Lenovo, which has some things which are better than my old HP (for starters, shutting the laptop doesn’t turn it off, and since I use a large monitor at work this is a good thing), other things which drive me crazy (it’s a bit slower and is most noticeable by the 3-second pause before it will open a new browser window).
Artomatic seems to be going well. I set up a guestbook after the first weekend and there are a couple of comments in it that made me smile. No sales, alas, but hope springs eternal. I do think I’m going to run out of business cards before the end, so I decided to give Zazzle’s cards a whirl and printed some out. They should be here at the start of next week, which is good.
Charlie and I saw the Israeli movie Jellyfish last night and both loved it. It’s co-directed by the husband-and-wife team of Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen, and written by Geffen. If I didn’t know better, though, I’d have thought it was written by Keret. I first discovered him through his graphic novel Jetlag (drawn by the Actus comic collective in Israel), and love his short stories—and while the film adaptation of his story “Kneller’s Happy Campers” (which he had nothing to do with) is reportedly awful, I think Asaf Hanuka’s graphic novel adapation of it into Pizzeria Kamikaze is great. Anyway, it’s a good, solid movie that doesn’t overstay its welcome; I was impressed with not only the script that alternates between dreamy tableaus and harsh reality, but with the visual stylings of Keret/Geffen. I’ll keep an eye out for their next film project.
The Capitol Hill Classic 10K last weekend was a blast, both for running it (I’d missed it last year thanks to an injury) as well as seeing old friends. It made me really appreciate both the work I’d put into exercise and running since mid-April, as well as all the people I’ve met through the sport over the years. Good times, good times. Even if I am starting to look like Paula Radcliffe and her hideously bad form when it comes to running, it seems.
Remember how I said I had three things I would think about buying if I sold things at Artomatic? Somehow I’ve ended up with two of them. Thanks to a gift card for my birthday back in March, I picked up Mario Kart Wii, which is so much fun it’s mind-boggling. I even got Charlie to play it and he, too, is all over it. Super, super fun, I cannot recommend this highly enough. (Also on the Wii front is Wii Fit, which I set up this morning and used for half an hour. I got it primarily for the balance and yoga exercises, and I love how well it analyzes my form. I think Fred will be delighted with the end results of me using this on a regular basis.)
Also, I was looking at the laser printer that I’ve been eyeing and the price had suddenly dropped $60 due to an instant rebate. Well, clearly it was a sign that I should buy it now. So it arrived today and I will set it up this weekend. I’m also quite pleased that it’s wireless, so I can set it up across the room and have it out of the way. I haven’t had a home printer in over a decade. What a strange feeling!
Last but not least, it is a super-small world. A week ago, on my way home from work I got trapped on the GW Parkway for 2 1/2 hours due to an accident in the southbound lanes that made the police completely shut down the entire parkway. Eventually everyone shut off their cars and walked around a bit, talked, and so forth. (I took the opportunity to read almost all of Tithe by Holly Black, which is also this month’s book club selection.) The entire time, though, I kept looking at the guy in the car behind me because he looked so very familiar. It wasn’t until afterwards that it finally clicked, though. It was my good friend Jon‘s cousin David, whom I haven’t seen in a decade. Bizarrely, he looks completely unchanged. (No doubt there is a portrait aging away in his attic.) Meanwhile, I look pretty radically different than I did in the late ’90s (much less weight and much less hair) so it didn’t surprise me that I didn’t look at all the same. But still, how funny is that?
This weekend, I am looking forward to not having to go away for Memorial Day weekend in, well, quite a while. Perhaps I can finally photograph some of Rolling Thunder? That’d be nice.
I’ve joked with friends before that I have a very well-realized fantasy life, one involving having somehow hit the lottery for so much money that I will never have to work again. (This is impressive, as I almost never actually play the lottery.)
But after browsing through the Criterion DVD section of Barnes & Noble yesterday (while contemplating taking advantage of their buy-2-get-1-free sale on all DVDs in the store), I decided that if somehow this fantasy life ever does happen, one of the things I will do is buy every single Criterion DVD I can get my hands on, then start working my way through the entire collection.
Sure, eventually it might get boring, but I’m willing to take that chance.
This is more for my own amusement than anything else; these are the movies that I saw in the theatre (versus on DVD, or watched on a plane, or some other non-movie-theatre option) in 2007. My list for 2006 is pretty pathetic (it was a bad year for me getting out and catching a flick!), so the difference should hopefully be pretty significant!
This is more for my own amusement than anything else; these are the movies that I saw in the theatre (versus on DVD, or watched on a plane, or some other non-movie-theatre option) in 2006.