Movies
drorzel | August 9, 2006Technorati reveals a bunch of responses to my weekend post on genre fiction, and I wanted to at least note a few of them here.
Over at Brad DeLong's, he highlights my comments about story pacing, which sparked some interesting comments. A number of people object that books and movies are too long these days, compared to the past. While there's no denying that many books have swelled, I think that's sort of orthogonal to the sort of pace I was talking about-- you may or may not think that the action advances the plot quickly enough, but there's more happening at any given moment in most modern…
drorzel | August 4, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger is right up my alley:
What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally....
A bunch of my co-bloggers have weighed in already, and it's hard not to duplicate thier choices, so I won't even try. (Unoriginal answers below the fold...)
There are a bunch of different ways to take this question, so I'll suggest a few different movies.
The most fun of any of the science-based movies I can think of would be Real Genius. The actual science…
drorzel | July 18, 2006The article about physicists in movies cited previously had one other thing worth commenting on: the fictional portrayal of the practice of science:
All these films illustrate a fundamental pattern for movie science. Rarely is the central scientific concept utterly incorrect, but filmmakers are obviously more interested in creating entertaining stories that sell tickets than in presenting a lesson in elementary physics. They also know that scenes of scientists at a lab bench do not generally make for gripping movie moments. Indeed, the need for drama often pushes the basic scientific idea to…
drorzel | July 18, 2006Benjamin Cohen at The World's Fair posts a link to an article about physicists in movies. The author provides a surprisingly detailed breakdown of what must be every character described as a physicist in the history of motion pictures. He also says really nasty things about What the Bleep Do We Know?, which warms my heart.
In the "elsewhere on the web" list at the bottom of the article, they mention the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics site, which was the subject of the fourth post ever on Uncertain Principles. Which is all the excuse I need for some Classic Edition blogging-- the original…
drorzel | July 18, 2006On Saturday, Kate and I went to see Johnny Depp swish his way through a second movie as Captain Jack Sparrow, with assistance from Kiera Knightly, Orlando Bloom, and a lot of other wooden props. She's posted a review with spoilers, and I'll post some spoilers below the fold, but my one-word, spoiler-free review is here:
Excessive.
To expand, the movie was not just too long, it was too much. Individual pieces of it were a good deal of fun, but there were too many pieces, and the whole was less than the sum of the parts. More details (with massive movie-destroying SPOILERS) below the fold.
To…
drorzel | June 4, 2006Despite generating a surprising number of comments with last week's burning question (thanks to Kate for the suggestion), we didn't actually go see X-Men III until yesterday afternoon. Short verdict: Not quite as bad as I was led to believe.
The longer version is either on Kate's LiveJournal, or below the fold.
As lots of people have said, the fundamental problem with this movie is that it really wanted to be two different movies. The Phoenix plot deserved a movie all its own (at least based on the number of comic books and Saturday morning cartoons it took up previously), and the mutant cure…
drorzel | May 30, 2006While channel-surfing the other night, I caught a few minutes of a program claiming to present the "100 Funniest Movies of All Time," and was a little baffled at the choices I saw represented. As with most list shows, it was way too heavy on recent stuff (The 40-Year-Old Virgin might be really funny, but it's too recent to be on an all-time list), but they seemed to be particularly misguided, even by the standards of pop-culture list shows.
I didn't watch much of it, but today Ed Brayton has the full list, and it's clear that the producers are using "funny" in a different sense than I do. Ed…
drorzel | May 26, 2006Gandalf or Magneto?
(Look, it's the ninth week of our ten-week Spring term, and including the Winter term, we've been in session since January with only a one-week break. I'm getting a little punchy, all right?)
drorzel | May 11, 2006Via a LiveJournal post on the dorkiest thing ever, a link that isn't new, but new to me: The Lord of the Rings in quotes from The Princess Bride:
PETER JACKSON: Frodo and Sam don't get burned up by the lava.
AUDIENCE: What?
PETER JACKSON: Frodo and Sam don't get burned up by the lava. I'm explaining to you because you looked nervous.
drorzel | April 23, 2006Kate and I went to see Thank You for Smoking yesterday (Short review: About as good an adaptation of the original book as you could hope for, and much more my thing than Kate's). The set of trailers we got was generally excruciating-- lots of film-festival material about quirky families being awful to one another. Granted, it's not really the audience you want to pitch X-Men III to, but I don't know if I've seen a more dispiriting block of trailers ever.
The most excruciating, of course, was the trailer for United 93, a lovingly detailed September 11th movie. And, apparently, based on poster…
drorzel | March 7, 2006Skot Kurruk explains the Best Picture result (below the fold, for those with sensitive ears):
In the end, after all the talk of whether or not Hollywood (and, by laughable extension, our whole beknighted country) was ready to fully laud a film where rabbit-eyed cowboy Jake Gyllenhall happily takes it up the ass . . . the answer was a clear "Nope." We just weren't ready.
drorzel | March 4, 2006Seed is meeting their contractual obligation as members of the American media by offering some science-based Oscars. This is a rare year in which I really don't care at all about the actual awards. I haven't seen any of the movies nominated for Best Picture, and I don't really have much interest in seeing any of them. The only reason I'll watch any of the telecast is to see what Jon Stewart does (my prediction: he'll be terrifically funny to his usual audience (liberal bloggers), and will completely lose the septuagenarian demographic that is the primary target for the Oscar telecast, and he'…