Happy boartime!

Anyone got a preference?

(no subject)

Nice little pre-movie ad-writeup by Mr. Byrne.

Other famous people I wish kept such blogs include:
- Weird Al
- Tim Schafer (non-promotional)
- Ween
- Antonia Bird
- MC Bat Commander (in or out of character)
- Frank Black
- Damon Albarn
- Joanna Newsom
- Jim Jarmusch
- Alex Cox

Somehow I think a Morrissey blog would suck. I wonder why that is.

Wizard People, Dear Reader; Brothers Grimm

I was going to give a go to doing a little writeup on each movie I see this year, just as a defined time bracket. So let's see if I do it. (Inspired by n0wak!)

- Wizard People, Dear Reader (Chris Columbus). New year's morning, 12:15am or so. View count: 5? 6?
If you haven't seen this, you ought to attempt to do so. Site's sum-up:

To experience it, viewers need to get a copy of the first Harry Potter movie and watch it with the sound off, replacing the original soundtrack with Neely's narration.

I do recommend that you watch it thus first, rather than just listening to the mp3s, because (amusing though they are) they do benefit from the context. The new soundtrack saves a crap, crap movie. The original is a Chris Columbus nightmare of halfassedery that plods along through its dated cg, adorned with over-enunciating children and the occasional awesome character actor who is essentially wasted. Wizard People, however, is incredibly hilarious and well-observed. The idea of forcing a new story into the footprint of another is fairly awesome on its own, but when the new story willfully ignores and waves away obvious plot components (like Harry's lack of skill), flips genders (Snape) and renames characters ridiculously for no real reason (Meowmers!), you know you have a winner. It's internally pretty consistent, despite its obstacles. The timing is usually great, and really it only lags toward the middle of the second half.
Conclusion: Boffo laff riot. I will watch probably many more times, and listen to the mp3s alone, yes I will.

- Brothers Grimm (Terry Gilliam). New year's day, 6pm-ish. View count: 1.
When this was over, the first thing I did was to google "Brothers Grimm" what happened. (I wanted to account for instances of 'what the hell happened?' and the like.)
It did not really come out well. It appears that Gilliam had some studio control issues, unsurprisingly (he mentions in an interview that among other things, he wanted Matt Damon (shudder) to wear a prosthetic nose, but the studio would not allow it. This is the level of control they command). It also appears that he may have been actively trying to make a simple crowd pleaser to get some studio cash, or some such thing. This seems more or less plausible. I am unable to reconcile the thing we saw with any conception of Terry Gilliam I currently hold or held in the past. I am forced to wonder why he didn't Alan Smithee the thing.
There were pieces of enjoyable Gilliamy material, but the whole was just empty of anything meaty to care about or indeed pay attention to (BURN on the Hollywood movie machine).
Reading a summary on some critical site, after the movie, was the first indication of one of the brothers' motivations. The plot heaved along without regard for being actually propelled; things would happen without any apparent cause (the bad guys were bad for no reason, the brothers would get captured and moved from place to place through no action or visible inaction), none of the characters grew into anything at all approaching adequacy, and the fairy tale imagery and mythos was almost entirely wasted on half-goofy implementations. (The only exception was possibly the spider-horse scene, which was new to me conceptually and pretty fun (minus the cg which was mostly crap). Oh, and the tarbaby/gingerbread man while it was still a tarbaby was pretty great. But great for no reason, really, and could have been so much scarier in pursuit of its goal.)
Conclusion: Unfortunate, empty. Wasted effort of great director. Made me long for Otesanek.