Rants and Ruminations

D-Box motion effects seats

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Color me unimpressed.  I have endured a test run of the latest Hollywood gimmick – D-Box motion effects seats, which will be in use for the release of Inception this week in a few theaters across the nation.  To “enhance” the action or tension on the screen, the theater seat jolts, wiggles, tilts, swerves, etc.

First, which really engrossing movies need to be “enhanced” by the furniture?

Second, this technology just isn’t that impressive to those of us who have experienced virtual reality rides (like Disneyland’s “Star Tours”) at amusement parks, boardwalks and carnivals.  (BTW “Star Tours” is over twenty years old and is closing this summer for a “re-imagining”.)  The D-Box is more like the experience of dropping a quarter in a motel massage bed.

3-D is here to stay; but I think that motion effects seats will go the way of Cinerama and Smell-O-Vision.

Toy Story 3 with an early inspiration for our Oscar Dinner

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There's a surprise in store for Mr. Potato Head

 

As you know, each Oscar night we prepare a dinner with dishes that are featured in or are inspired by the Best Picture nominees. Toy Story 3 is certain to be among the ten nominees, and so I have decided that it will represented in our 2011 Oscar Dinner with……….a tortilla.  (If you’ve seen the film, you’ll understand.)

Here’s the page on our annual Oscar Dinner.

Why hasn't there been a good Babe Ruth movie?

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Babe Ruth as Babe Ruth in The Pride of the Yankees

 

Why hasn’t there been a good biopic of Babe Ruth?  The three extant have ranged from unmemorable (1992’s The Babe with John Goodman and 1991’s Babe Ruth with Stephen Lang) to execrable (1948’s The Babe Ruth Story with the remarkably unathletic William Bendix).

Here is the greatest baseball player who ever lived.  (Only Ted Williams, Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays were in his league as a hitter, and Ruth was also a star pitcher in his early years – so there’s no argument that he was the greatest.)  Ruth transformed the game itself from station-to-station to the power game.

On top of that, The Babe was a great character:   a boisterous man of unrestrained appetites, a great athlete who did not look athletic, nevertheless charismatic and very funny.  He was made for the movies.  Unfortunately, the great Babe Ruth movie hasn’t been written.

Incidentally, Babe Ruth has been portrayed in 30 movies, the first seven times by Babe Ruth himself.

poor William Bendix

The Golden Age of Baseball Movies

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Tom Hanks and Geena Davis in A League of Their Own

 

More excellent baseball movies were made between 1984 and 1994 than in any other period:  The Natural, Bull Durham, Eight Men Out, Field of Dreams, Major League, A League of their Own, Angels in the Outfield, The Scout, Cobb and Ken Burns’ Baseball.

Why didn’t this trend continue?  My guess is that Major League Baseball lost the hearts of Americans during the MLB Strike of 1994-95.  That Strike even forced cancellation of the entire postseason, including the 1994 World Series.

Before the Strike, my kitchen and auto radios were always tuned to the station that broadcast my favorite baseball team; those radios are tuned to NPR now.   I was familiar with every regular player, starting pitcher and key reliever in the National League;  I’m not any more.  The Strike made me go cold turkey and killed my baseball habit.

By the measures of revenue and attendance, MLB has been even more successful since the strike, but I don’t believe that it is loved as much as before.

It was also a key time in American sports culture – as baseball was being eclipsed by soccer as a youth sport and by the NBA and NFL as a spectator sport.  Baseball did not understand how vulnerable its place in American culture was.

Americans have been burned once – and severely burned –  by baseball.  We will go the ballpark as an entertainment event, but no longer from devotion to the sport and our favorite teams.  That devotion – which so warmly received the baseball movies of 1984-1994 – is no longer there.

Bob Uecker calls the action in Major League

Mick LaSalle on Toy Story 3

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The staff meeting does not go well.

 

Mick LaSalle has a great insight on Toy Story 3 and the fates to be suffered by the toys:

“Thrown out is the equivalent of death.

“Being put in the attic is the equivalent of retirement.

“Relocating is the equivalent of changing jobs.”

Read his blog here.  This post also links to his review.

My point here is that Toy Story 3 is BOTH a great children’s movie AND a great movie for adults, too.  I regret that lots of childless adults won’t see it.  Adults should see this movie – at times it is thoughtful, profound, moving and hilarious.  Hey, take a date to this movie – it’ll make her/him laugh and admire your movie taste.

Helen Mirren nekked!

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indieWIRE has this article (with photos) on the almost 65-year-old Dame Helen Mirren posing nude for New York Magazine.

But don’t overlook the 1969 film Age of Consent, where Mirren plays about a third of the movie naked, and the other two thirds wearing nothing but the most threadbare and easily discardable short cotton dress.

Shot when Mirren was 24, she plays a teen wild child abused and neglected by a hateful aunt in the remotest Australian coastal settlement.  James Mason, artistically blocked and on the run from his fame as a painter, shows up, and she becomes his muse.  Age of Consent is available on DVD, Netflix streaming  and occasionally on TCM.

This photo is substantially cropped

Winter's Bone: Debra Granik

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Director Debra Granik

 

Winter’s Bone Director Debra Granik has delivered one of the year’s best American films – with just her second feature.  Every moment of Winter’s Bone seems absolutely real and absolutely true.  Granik shot in southern Missouri, and used local people, local homes, local clothes and local music – all choices that result in the film’s authenticity. Even the Army recruiter is a real-life Army recruiter.  Similarly, the soundtrack is spare and pure – pretty much just the snapping twigs, chirping birds, barking dogs and sputtering pickups of the Ozarks; the audience feels the gripping story without the filmmaker layering on manipulative music.

Granik’s first feature, Down to the Bone, won acting awards for its star Vera Farmiga as a grocery clerk mom who undergoes drug rehab without support from her husband or employer.  In both Winter’s Bone and Down to the Bone, Granik lets her actors act, most compellingly when they are not talking.  Down to the Bone is available on DVD and Netflix streaming.

Granik and screenwriting partner Anne Rosellini were looking for a story that featured a strong female protagonist ans found it in Daniel Woodrell’s novel.  Here are Granik and Woodrell on NPR’s Fresh Air.

Richard von Busack also has an excellent interview with Granik and Lawrence – click here and scroll below his review.

Thanks to David H. Schleicher of the Schleicher Spin, here is the blog of Marideth Sisco, the musical consultant for Winter’s Bone, and the lead singer in the pickin’ scene.

TCM’s Korean War Marathon

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On June 24 and 25, TCM is showing fourteen straight Korean War movies: The Steel Helmet (1951),  Men In War (1951) , Men Of The Fighting Lady (1954), I Want You (1951), Battle Circus (1953),  Tank Battalion (1958), Mission Over Korea (1953), Battle Taxi (1955), The Bamboo Prison (1955), All the Young Men (1960), Take the High Ground! (1953), Time Limit (1957), The Rack (1956) and  Hell in Korea (1956).

If you’re gonna watch just one, I recommend The Steel Helmet, a gritty classic by the great Sam Fuller, a WWII combat vet who brooked no sentimentality about war.  Fuller and Peckinpah favorite Gene Evans is especially good as the sergeant.

This time, TCM is not showing the three most well-known Korean War movies:   Manchurian Candidate, Pork Chop Hill and M*A*S*H.

Earlier this year, TCM broadcast War Hunt,  a 1962 film about Robert Redford joining a Korean War unit as a new replacement with John Saxon as the platoon’s psycho killer.  Along with Redford, Sidney Pollack and Francis Ford Coppola are in the cast, making War Hunt the only film with three Oscar-winning directors as actors.   Don’t blink, or you’ll miss for Coppola as an uncredited convoy truck driver.

Sex and the City 2

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I haven’t seen Sex and the City 2 and don’t plan to, so I am not weighing in on the film itself. But its critical reception can best be described as uniformly venomous.  For each movie, Metacritic.com assigns numeric scores to the reviews of America’s leading critics and averages them into a Metacritic score between 1 and 100.  Generally, really outstanding movies score in the high 70s, and dreadful movies score in the low 30s.  Sex and the City 2‘s Metacritic score is 28.  As a comparison, the worst movies that I have seen this year are Tooth Fairy (Metacritic score of 36) and Leap Year (Metacritic score of 33).   The worst movie that I saw last year was Paul Blart: Mall Cop, which scored a 39.  So we can safely say that Sex and the City 2 is widely reviled and will show up on the Worst of the Year lists.

I keep Best of the Year lists but not Worst of the Year lists.  Because I’m not a professional critic, I’m not required to see every movie.  I try to avoid the bad ones.  Because I repeatedly saw the trailer for Did You Hear About the Morgans?, I skipped that one.  The only reason that I have seen Tooth Fairy and Leap Year is because they were the only movies I hadn’t seen that were showing on very long airplane flights.

I love Metacritic because the critical consensus is generally closer to my taste than that of individual critics.  Click here and check it out for yourself.

Tuesday on TV: A better Avatar from 1970

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A Man Called Horse (1970)

 

This Tuesday, TCM is showing A Man Called Horse (1970).

Modern viewers will recognize most of the plot of Avatar herein.  In the early 19th century, Richard Harris is captured by American Indians and becomes assimilated into their culture.  Harris’ initiation into the tribe is one of cinema’s most cringe-worthy moments.  The film still stands up well  today.

A Man Called Horse fits into the subgenre of Westerns that are sympathetic to Native Americans, including  Little Big Man (1970), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Dances With Wolves (1990).   The trend became pronounced with Cheyenne Autumn in 1964 and has stayed healthy through the recent retelling of the Pocahontas story in The New Land.

Of course, even a worthy movie subgenre has its cliches.  Why is it that when the white guy encounters a native girl   –  It’s always the chief’s beautiful, unattached, nubile daughter?