Coming Distractions March 3rd, 2009

Keeping March Awesome Since 2009:

I've Loved You So Long
Australia (Australia?)
Ashes of Time Redux
Wonder Woman
In the Electric Mist
Lake City
Beverly Hills Chihuahua
Real Time
Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic
Weapons
Phish: The Clifford Ball
Shaun the Sheep: Back in the Ba-a-th

March Madness

Starting March 1st we are having a huge used previously viewed sale: Buy 1, get 1 free

Congratulations to Kate Crawford for winning our Oscar Contest with an astounding 20 correct responses out of 24 categories! So yeah, I watched the Oscars. Did you? Kinda ridiculous, no? Here's a quick recap in case you missed it: Slumdog Millionaire won a lot of awards, Curious Case of Benjamin Button only won the ones I wanted it to (art direction, makeup, and visual effects), and there was (excessive) singing and dancing and glitter! (oh my!) Sean Penn took best actor and gave a shout out to his buddy Mickey Rourke (and received perhaps the funniest comment of the evening from Robert Deniro). Kate Winslet won for best actress, and I still think she'd probably be a cool person to actually know. And they definitely didn't keep it under 3 hours long.

Oscar Nominated Movies We Currently Have in the Store:
Frozen River
Changeling
The Visitor
Wall-E
Wanted
Dark Knight
Iron Man
Man on Wire
Tropic Thunder
The Duchess
In Bruges
Encounters at the End of the World
Vicky Christina Barcelona

Most of the rest will be out March 10th.

Coming Distractions February 24th, 2009

Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder
Summer Heights High
IronWeed
Sex Drive
Haunting of Molly Hartley
What Just Happened

MetaMovies

What Just Happened is just one in a long history of movies about making movies. What makes one director take this (perhaps solipsistic and self-indulgent choice?) while others steer clear? Is it truly best to take the adage "film what you know" to heart? As with the great history of writers writing about other writers with writing block, do we want our art/entertainment to be so self-aware? Do we care what it's like to experience the terrible troubles of Hollywood/making movies? As with any other genre, the answer: Sometimes. And here's a list of some sometimeses to check out:


8 1/2
Mulholland Drive
Tropic Thunder
Son of Rambow
Barton Fink
Sunset Blvd
Postcards from the Edge
The Bad and the Beautiful
State and Main
Slipstream
Wag the Dog
Boogie Nights
Adaptation
Ed Wood
Cecil B. Demented
Lost in La Mancha
Chaplin
The Player
Storytelling
CQ
Cameraman
Sullivan's Travels

Coming Distractions February 17th, 2009

It's too late to stop them now:

Quarantine
I Served the King of England
Body of Lies
Flash of Genius
Religulous
Choke
Changeling
High School Musical 3
Midnight Meat Train
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People


Since we were speaking of windshield wipers (right?) here are a few other movies that have windshields prominent enough they should be listed in the credits.

Brown Bunny (hmm... for all the numerous and lengthy shots of driving in BB, all I can find stills of are the bj scene...)
Highway 61
Natural Born Killers
Stuck
Jurassic Park
Lost Highway
Wild at Heart
You got any more?


I have been reading this David Foster Wallace essay about his trip to the set of Lost Highway (from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again). Here is his trivia about Wild at Heart (p.168-169).

"Wild at Heart, starring Laura Dern as Lula and Nicolas Cage as Sailor, also feature Diane Ladd as Lula's mother. The actress Diane Ladd happens to be the actress Laura Dern's real mother. Wild at Heart itself, for all its heavy references to The Wizard of Oz, is actually a pomo-ish remake of Sidney Lumet's 1959 The Fugitive Kind, which starred Anna Magnani and Marlon Brando. The fact that Cage's performance in Wild at Heart strongly suggests either Brando doing an Elvis imitation or vice versa is not an accident, nor is the fact that both Wild at Heart and The Fugitive Kind use fire as a key image, nor is the fact that Sailor's beloved snakeskin jacket -- 'a symbol in my belief in freedom and individual choice' -- is just like the snakeskin jacket Brando wore in The Fugitive Kind. The Fugitive Kind happens to be the film version of Tennessee Williams's little-known Orpheus Descending, a play which in 1960, enjoying a new vogue in the wake of Lumet's film adaptation, ran Off-Broadway in NYC and featured Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, Laura Dern's parents, who met and married while starring in this play."

Whew! Awesome.

My only problem with the essay thus far is that DFW refers, several times, to Kyle Machlachlan as "potato-faced." I'm not entirely sure what that means. Urban Dictionary describes potato face (no hyphen) as either being:
1. Someone with an abnormally large forehead, similar to having a potato on it.
or
2. The process of lifting your chin up and sinking it back into your neck causing a chinless appearance.

Neither of which problems I really think Kyle has.
I assume he means bland?

My new favorite website (other than this one, of course!): Dear Old Love

Coming Distractions February 10th, 2009

A smorgasbord of DVDs:

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
Nights in Rodanthe
My Name is Bruce
Miracle at St. Anna
Blindness
Frozen River
W.
Best of Wholphin
Gospel Hill
The Romance of Astrea and Celadon

I was thinking about Julianne Moore today. I started thinking about her because I am planning to watch Blindness. The book, by Jose Saramago, was a really good time (though hard to imagine it being made into a mainstream film because some of those plots twists are real brutal. And there are no line breaks for different speakers, and no one has a name, the point of which is that you feel blind when you're reading it (and frightened, and angry) but which seems defeated when you're watching a movie. But I guess you could argue I was also looking at the words when I read it... but... ya know... really not the same thing.) Then I was thinking about JuliMoo because Savage Grace just came out in the nearish past (which was a bold part choice for an actor, if nothing else. It also has the most excruciating dinner party scene I've ever witnessed - harder even than watching Anne Hathaway's toast in Rachel Getting Married.) THEN, I found out that she was the voice of Aria (the super-computer) in Eagle Eye, and that's when I got really excited.

And no, I swear I didn't actually know the super-computer's name before today... But I've been wondering that for, like, for forever. Or since I paid to see it in the theater.
It was warm out back then. Did that ever really happen? I've got a cold. It makes me sad.

Which reminds me, you should go watch Frozen River.
Contest: can you spot the former Waterfront Video/Recycle North employee in Frozen River? (This is a really unfair contest - even his own mother didn't spot him.) Next week I'll try and get a screenshot of him to put up, so we can verify our answers. (Because I am so good with technology I am going to obtain said screen shot by doing something totally sophisticated like pausing the movie and taking a picture with my phone... )