A-Z Challenge: Ebert

I first started reading Roger Ebert's reviews back in 1997. I was working as a trainer at an outsourced call center company, on the CompuServe program.  One of the perks was a free CompuServe account, including access to all the forums.  My favorite was Ebert's movie forum.  I started reading his reviews regularly...I doubt I missed more than a handful of weeks in the past decade and a half.

I didn't always agree with him, but that was usually a trashy movie I liked but he didn't.  If he liked a movie, I was apt to like it, too.  That's not really the point, though...I didn't read his reviews because I needed a gut-check before shelling out cash for a ticket.  I read reviews of many movies I had no intention of ever seeing, simply because I enjoyed his writing and his wit.

And Ebert did have a sharp wit; he could trash a movie better than anyone else.  The best example is the battle he had with Rob Schneider over the "Deuce Bigalow" movies.  A critic (well, many critics, actually) had panned the film, and Schneider made a statement to the effect of, "Your opinion doesn't count because you haven't earned any awards yourself."

Ebert replied, "But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain...As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks."

When Roger Ebert fought cancer he won the first round, although the battle left him missing his lower jaw and it robbed him of the ability to speak (and eat).  His lost voice never impacted me...I was not accustomed to hearing it.  I never watched his TV show, and aside from a few interviews with Howard Stern, I had never really listened to him speak.  To me his voice was the same: it was his written voice, his general way with words.

I will miss that voice.  May he rest in peace.

A-Z Challenge: The Godfather

Please tell me you could see this one coming.  G-movies, Godfather...It's almost too obvious (NOTE: I would say it's cliche but calling things cliche is so cliche).

The Godfather is not only the best mob movie ever made, it's one of the best movies ever made.  I went through my childhood having seen bits and pieces of it.. I remember being ten or eleven and seeing some scenes from the beginning, including the infamous horse head scene.  If you don't know what I'm talking about you are not worthy of an explanation. 

I think I was in my late twenties by the time I finally sat down and watched it from beginning to end.  So many great lines came from The Godfather.  "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse," being up at the top of the list, but followed closely by, "It's a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes."

Honor, family, greed, fear, deception....so many things at play in one of the most classic crime dramas ever to play on the silver screen.  Not to mention the incredible acting by Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, and James Caan.  Yes, The Godfather is an American classic.

Ciao.

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A-Z Challenge: Forty Year-Old Virgin

I'm cheating a bit on the title by spelling out Forty (it's officially 40 in the movie title), but quite honestly I don't care.  The 40-Year-Old Virgin is hands-down one of the best comedies ever made.  Not only is it laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end, it has heart.

It's not just that Steve Carrell plays Andy perfectly, or that Paul Rudd, Seth Rogan, Jayne Lynch, and the rest of the supporting cast are able to earn honest laughs, too...What makes this movie work is that they all play it natural and actually make the characters feel real, not like the overblown caricatures they are.

I am tempted right now to go pop this DVD in, watch the movie twice, and then finish writing this.  Unfortunately I don't have time to do that.  I'll have to settle for reminiscing about my three favorite moments from the film:

- The car ride with Leslie Mann (the hottie from the bachelorette party).  Her epic drunken rant, from wishing for her period and French toast to the surprise collision ("That fucker came out of nowhere!") actually gets funnier each time I see it.

- When Andy tells Cal (Seth Rogan) that his girlfriend is actually a grandmother, Cal lets out a string of one-liners about grandma sex, including "Fuck her and have her send you a check for twelve dollars on your birthday."  Normally sex with a grandma jokes would not be very funny, but in context they are freaking hysterical.

- When Any's boss (Jayne Lynch) finds out he's a virgin and offers a discreet relationship that "will haunt your dreams."  Specifically, her tale of losing her virginity to their gardener when she was a teen, up to and including her Guatemalan love song (NOTE: I think it was Guatemalan.  I told you I don't have time to watch the movie right now, so I can't be sure).  The ultimate play-it-straight moment is when she sings.  She totally sells that scene.

My next favorite part is the entire rest of the movie.

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A-Z Challenge: Caddyshack

When I was 11 years old, we got a Betamax.  Now I realize younger readers may not have a clue as to what a Betamax was, so let me explain: The Betamax was a videotape machine, similar to VHS (Please tell me you remember those.  I do not want to be that old yet.), but Beta had much better quality and therefore less popularity.  (NOTE: Admitting that you do know what a Betamax was will do nothing but reveal that you are old, resist the temptation.  But do you remember how we used to have to rewind the tapes?  Ahh, the old days of home video...)

But this post is not about the Betamax, which is a B-word.  It's about the first movie we watched on our Betamax: Caddyshack.

I am quite grateful my parents let me watch an R-Rated movie when I was that young.  There were a couple brief flashes of nudity, but to my knowledge boobies have never hurt anyone, so that's not really an issue.  And my 5th-grade innocence aside, I had heard all the major swear words, so there was nothing new there.  I had no clue what drugs were, so the scenes of pot smoking went right over my head.

What I did understand was that:

- Rodney Dangerfield has the coolest golf bag ever made
- Ted Knight getting hit in the Johnson by a golf ball is hilarious ("I guess I should have yelled 'two!'")
- A candy bar in a swimming pool really does look like doody (Did you ever notice how it was caddy day at the pool, but only from 1pm-1:15pm?)
- Bill Murray and gopher puppets are all that is needed for an 11-year-old boy to laugh and enjoy an adult comedy

A few years later I even worked as a caddy one summer, when I was thirteen (between 7th and 8th grade).  It was a right of passage, as both of my older brothers caddied at Rosemont Country Club through high school.  I would have kept at it, except we moved from Akron to Dallas, and the commute was hell.  I did learn how awesome it was to have a sweaty wad of cash at the end of a shift, and how it was even more awesome to walk past the mall on my way home and spend all the money before it ever saw the inside of my piggy bank.  Still, I had managed to save up close to a hundred bucks, mostly one-dollar bills, which made an impressive pile on my bed.

(NOTE: I had originally planned to make this post about the third movie I watched on the Betamax, Conan the Barbarian, which is actually quite good and worth mentioning.  The director kept the dialogue low in the screenplay, opting to use music to emphasize the visual element, and the film does have an amazing soundtrack.  Makes me want to watch that one again.  The second movie I saw on the Betamax was Star Wars, which was my vote for the first movie to watch but I was over-ruled by everyone else in the family.  But it's not S-day yet, so the rest of that story will have to wait...)

A-Z Challenge: The Abyss

Today starts the A-Z blogging challenge.  My theme: Movies I love.  There will be an eclectic mix of films...comedy, horror, sci-fi, and drama (NOTE: wait, let me double-check the list...Yeah, there's one or two I could label drama, and even one true romance).

So starting the challenge at A, I'm going with an awesome movie by James Cameron, Oscar-nominated and groundbreaking for technology at the time of its release: The Abyss.  I could also pick Avatar, but The Abyss came first so it has dibs.

The Abyss is a real genre-busting film.  It has strong dramatic elements, but at it's heart it's great science fiction.  But unlike a lot of sci-fi that takes place far in the future and/or in space, the Abyss is set in the modern world, which makes it more accessible to non-geeks.

Two parts of The Abyss stand out to me.  First is the scene where Bud and Lindsay are trapped in a room of a research station at the bottom of the ocean, and the room is quickly flooding.  They have only one dive suit with enough oxygen for one person to make the long swim to the main lab.  The solution: Lindsay will drown herself and Bud, being the stronger swimmer, will tow her back.  The cold water should help preserve her so they can resuscitate her in the lab.  This is an intense scene, and the way the relationship between Bud and his estranged wife leads up to this pivotal moment earns high marks for drama.

The second stand-out moment is when Bud suits up to dive to the bottom of the deep-sea trench (e.g., The Abyss) to disarm a nuclear warhead.  This is no ordinary dive suit: It's filled with breathable liquid.  In order to survive the immense pressure, the dive suit cannot be filled with air.  A super-oxygenated liquid is pumped into the suit, and Bud breathes this ("We all breathed liquid for nine months, your body will remember...").  The best science fiction is built on fact, and this liquid does exist, although it's not quite usable to the extent depicted in the film.  I guess that's why James Cameron took a sub to the bottom of the Marianas Trench last week.

If you've never seen The Abyss, check it out.  It's long, but it's worth it.

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Movie Review- Coraline

We took the kids to see Coraline yesterday. It's a kids movie, filmed with stop-motion animation and presented in a new kind of 3-D. The 3-D doesn't try to make the objects float out into the theater as it used to. This seems to give depth to the screen, extending the distance between the characters at the front of the screen and the depth of the background. It was pretty cool.

I liked it. My wife liked it. My older son (age 7) liked it.

"That movie was just terrible," according to my younger son (age 4).

I don't think he liked wearing the 3-D glasses, for starters. I can't totally blame him. They aren't the cardboard kind like they used to make, but at least with those kind you looked cool, as long as you didn't wear them outside of the theater.

These days they have these plastic glasses with big over-sized grandma frames that make you look like a dork, even in the darkened movie theater.

But I don't think it was a style issue that my little one objected to. This is a kid who will wear a green Power Ranger costume to the supermarket. He's not all that self-conscious (yet).

I guess he thought there were a couple of spooky parts. SPOILER ALERT! Like when the "Other Mother" turns into a tall stringy witch and locks Coraline in the dank dungeon bedroom where there are three ghosts of kids that died in there, and Coraline has to find their missing eyes to free their souls. Or the part when the Other Mother wants to sew buttons onto Coraline's eyes with a needle so sharp you will hardly feel it, because everyone in that world has them. Or the part toward the end where the Other Mother's arms and legs turn into sharp metal spider legs and she traps Coraline in her web.

So for most of the movie, the little one sat there without his glasses on, starting at the blurry screen, just so he could complain about his headache once we got in the car.

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Guess the Plot- The Oscar's

The Evil Editor posted his 3rd Annual Oscar Guess the Plot. I was one of the faithful minions who submitted fake plots. You should meander on over to his site and check it out, and then let me know if you can guess the plot, but here's the twist:

You have to guess which was my fake plot. I don't care about the real ones.