Entertainment
pharyngula | March 5, 2008Will Smith's last movie, I Am Legend, was apocalyptically bad — in particular, the ending was awful. Now Phil has the alternate ending that was filmed but not used — I agree with him that it's not perfect, but it is immensely better, and is also a little closer to the spirit of the book.
pharyngula | February 26, 2008I'm pretty darn sure after seeing the trailer that I want to see this movie, but there's one little fillip, one name that gets briefly dropped, that really makes me wonder what's going to happen. It isn't explained in the clip, unfortunately, it's just there, so I'll have to cough up $5 to find out.
pharyngula | February 25, 2008Does anybody care about them anymore? I didn't watch it at all, and I also missed most of the nominated movies this year. We had the winner, No Country for Old Men, playing in town a few weeks ago, unfortunately coinciding with an exceptionally heavy work week for me, and I couldn't find time to see. There Will Be Blood is playing at the Morris Theatre this week, and I may have to squeeze in a few hours to check it out…but not because Day-Lewis won an award.
Isn't that what it's about, anyway? If we're going to take off 3 hours or more for some entertainment, it makes more sense to go see the…
pharyngula | February 11, 2008I'm a big fan of modern Scandinavian folk music, and am often listening to great bands like Sorten Muld and Hedningarna. I don't know the language, though, so I'm usually just grooving on the sound … so it's greatly appreciated when a Swede translates a Hedningarna song for me. And, as it turns out, this particular song is very appropriate to blogging.
pharyngula | February 4, 2008This is my favorite Roy Zimmerman song (so far). It just portrays perfectly the contradictory, weird mess of a country we live in.
pharyngula | January 19, 2008While it had its moments, and was based on a provocative and interesting series, I wasn't that impressed with The Golden Compass movie adaptation. Still, I'm disappointed that the decision has been made that the subsequent books will not be filmed. It apparently did very poor box office in the US, so it isn't a surprise, I suppose.
I have to compare it to the Narnia movie, though. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a great gilded turd, an awful piece of poor storytelling and suspension-of-disbelief shattering illogic, with nice cgi. The Golden Compass had a story that was given short…
pharyngula | January 12, 2008
Sad news…Vampira has died. She was very young for a vampire, only 86, and there's no word on whether it was a stake or sunlight that ended her long career as one of the rare Finnish vampires (real name: Maila Syrjäniemi). You may recall her from her important role in Plan 9 from Outer Space.
It's the last sad whimper to the lingering death of an old tradition. When I was a young'un, there were horror hosts everywhere—you knew that if you turned on the TV anywhere at about 11 on a Friday or Saturday night, there'd be somebody in a Halloween costume introducing some old black-and-white horror…
pharyngula | January 6, 2008I saw the new Will Smith movie, I Am Legend, last night. In short, it was far worse than I expected, with a drawn out and rather boring beginning (Smith is lonely, everyone is dead except for his dog. Got it), and the ending felt like a stapled-on feel-good absurdity that didn't follow from the premise—and is only a happy ending if your dream of paradise is an armed camp of Christians. The only virtue I'd heard about the story is that the hero is openly atheist … but that was a disappointment, too, because I discovered he was the wrong kind of atheist.
Atheists in the movies aren't that…
pharyngula | December 19, 2007Roy has this nice inclusive Christma-Hanu-Rama-Ka-Dona-Kwanzaa song for the season, but notice: no mention of squidmas. Time to riot in the streets! Tear down some embassies! Defenestrate folkies!
I think you all need to go to RoyZimmerman.com and sign up for his mailing list so you can track his War on Squidmas.
pharyngula | December 19, 2007All good fanboys and girls will now clap their hands and squeal with joy: Peter Jackson has signed on to make The Hobbit.
pharyngula | December 19, 2007I was looking forward to the movie, I Am Legend, that is coming to Morris in the next month or so, but the first review I've seen is not promising. I've read the book and the previous film adaptations; the original I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is a classic with an excellent twist, raising the troubling question of just who the monster is. The first movie, The Last Man on Earth, with Vincent Price is also good, and sticks to the story fairly faithfully.
The one most people have seen, The Omega Man, is awful. It throws away the ending of the story with its disturbing attempt to make people…
pharyngula | December 10, 2007My daughter works at our small town movie theater, and she's got the inside scoop: apparently the locals are boycotting The Golden Compass. Attendance is down, almost the only people going are university students, the owner has had calls from people in the community complaining about the movie. Darn. I guess the theater should have booked Mel Gibson's Passion again — that thing hung around forever here, and had loads of people showing up every night.
Ah, rural America.
pharyngula | December 8, 2007Here's an interesting take on The Golden Compass: it's a Protestant movie. I can see that.
pharyngula | December 8, 2007I suspect that many reviews of this movie are going to begin with some variant of the sentiment, "I was disappointed." This one is no exception. It's just not a very good movie; it's one that packed in lots of miscellaneous detail from the book it is based on, but thereby threw away the core of the story … and it shows. It's a movie that races along inventively, but futilely, leaving you wondering at the end what the point of all the rushing about of armies of strange characters was all about.
This is an intrinsic problem to translating Pullman's books to a different medium. They aren't just…
pharyngula | December 5, 2007Here's what CNN says about The Golden Compass:
Culture: A star-studded, big-budget fantasy film released for Christmastime features religion as the villain. Hollywood is collaborating with a militant atheist British children's book author to indoctrinate children.
Gregg Easterbrook (you already know to expect drooling idiocy) babbles without comprehension. Bill Donohue, of course, thinks it is a plot to corrupt children.
Get real. This movie isn't going to convert anyone to atheism. It's a fantasy story. It's got witches and talking bears in it. It's going to generate about as many new…
pharyngula | December 4, 2007Although if you're at work, it probably isn't a good idea to crank up the volume. Unless you work in a lab, in which case your colleagues might join in on the chorus.
pharyngula | December 2, 2007I'm very much looking forward to the opening of The Golden Compass at the end of this week — and we're even getting the premiere here in little ol' Morris. I'm having mixed feelings about the way it's getting enlisted in the culture wars, though. It's a fantasy movie, and it's ultimately going to succeed or fail on its merits as entertainment, not its ideology.
Still, I have to like the attitude in this Mark Morford column.
It's this: If your ancient, authoritarian, immutable belief system is threatened by a handful of popular novels, if your ostensibly all-powerful, unyielding creed is…
pharyngula | November 28, 2007The lesson is that you should never, ever give a network executive control of your fate.
Those kinds of macabre twists would be Futurama's undoing. Fox was expecting something familiar, The Simpsons in space. Executives certainly were not prepared for the bizarre contours of Groening and Cohen's brave new world. "The network's attitude quickly went from tremendous excitement to great fear," Groening says. "They were very troubled by the suicide booth. They didn't like the 'All-Tentacle Massage' parlor."
How can you not like the 'All-Tentacle Massage' parlor? Obviously, Groening and Co.…