Recently in Movies Category

Patsy and I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night. I'm a big fan of Indiana Jones and the wife basically indulged me by going with me on a week night. For once, I think I totally agree with Roger Ebert on some things. One thing he says about this franchise and his love of pulp fiction expresses my feelings on the matter precisely. He says, "What I want is goofy action--lots of it.". Bingo. I'm not going to engage in spoilers here. I didn't read any review in its entirety before I saw it for myself. Some critics are obsessed with "freshness" and I was a little worried about what I might read from them beforehand. This was a movie where I was hoping to get exactly what I expected: "Goofy action". My worries were unfounded. The four or five reviews I've read this morning were mostly fair with it. Some liked it more than others. The "freshness" freaks, like Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, didn't like it as much but that was no surprise. Patsy and I liked it a lot but see it for yourself.

103 days until football season ...

Quote of the Day

I can say that if you liked the other Indiana Jones movies, you will like this one, and that if you did not, there is no talking to you.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "If I paint a negative picture, it’s because you always enjoy a film more if you go in with fewer expectations - let your hopes be dashed to desperation, purchase your movie ticket and come out with a smile better than you could ever have expected."

I've been wanting to see Juno since I heard about it. The screenplay was written by Diablo Cody. Much is made about Cody being an ex-stripper. She was also a blogger. I stumbled across her blog a few years ago while blog-hopping and had no idea what to make of it. Along with her excellent writing were extremely graphic pictures of herself. She was a stripper in Minnesota at the time and her blog was quite an unusual mix. Anyway, Juno is a joyous movie about a young girl growing up. All of the characters are wonderful but the star, Ellen Page, is phenomenal. I really enjoyed this film and I'm glad I waited to see it at home, where I can back up and repeat scenes I didn't get or couldn't hear on the first pass. This is the kind of movie where the dialog shouldn't be missed.

Speaking of movies, I think the new Get Smart movie will suffer the same fate as the Bewitched movie. Some characters are too embedded in and too attached to the actor who played them. Elizabeth Montgomery IS Samantha Stevens and Don Adams IS Maxwell Smart. Ironically, Steve Carell is in both movies and he'll suffer comparison in both: To Adams in Get Smart and Paul Lynde in Bewitched. Hard for me to believe that Lynde has been dead for 26 years. I have such vivid memories of his quips and his great laugh.

Peter Marshall: The average American hot dog is 14% ... what?
Paul Lynde: Edible

As for tomorrow night's Game 7 between the San Antonio Spurs and New Orleans Hornets:

I offer one from the CrabAppleLane back deck this Sunday morning.

The catbird seat - May 18, 2008

109 days until football season ...

Quote of the Day

I don't want to give my baby to a couple who describes themselves as wholesome. I was looking for maybe a thirty-something graphic designer with a cool Asian girlfriend who kicks ass on the bass guitar, but I don't know, I don't wanna get too particular.

Juno MacGuff, Juno

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "Fox Searchlight’s Juno has now grossed over $143.1 million worldwide ($125M domestic), making the film the most successful independent movie since 2002’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding (which grossed $241.4M domestically)."

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Happy Birthday, Dad.

We watched Midnight this morning mainly because there was not much else to do. It’s been a miserable weekend here. Rained most of the day yesterday and all day today. Unlike my dad and my wife, I’m not an old movie fan. There are some classics that I still enjoy but most old movies distract me with their technical shortcomings. Midnight had a few of those but they were forgivable mainly because Claudette Colbert and John Barrymore are film treasures. They were delightful. Don Ameche put forth a good effort but was simply overmatched. Colbert is certainly one of the best film comediennes of her generation, up there with Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, and Katharine Hepburn. It was introduced on Turner Classic Movies by Robert Osborne and he compared it to classic screwball comedies, It Happened One Night and Bringing Up Baby. Not so sure about that. It didn't have that kind of frenetic pace. For what it's worth, I think Bringing Up Baby overdid the zany. Midnight doesn't quite rise to the level of It Happened One Night (How many do?) but it gave a good effort.

I offer one from the CrabAppleLane backyard.

CrabAppleLane tomatoes on a dark, dreary Sunday - April 27, 2008

130 days until football season ...

Quote of the Day

From the moment you looked at me, I had an idea you had an idea.

Eve Peabody, Midnight

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "Red Bull in Hungary makes you wish you had never seen this image. Scrubbing your eyeballs doesn't work, I tried."

The name of the blog tells you everything you need to know. -Rob

I just finished watching the final episode of HBO’s John Adams last night. It featured stirring music, breathtaking period scenery, great performances, and compelling subject matter. I didn't read the David McCullough book that the mini-series is based on so I don't know how true they are to it but I think the filmmakers did justice to the history. John and Abigail Adams were a team in every sense of the word and that was conveyed appropriately here by Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. Tom Wilkinson's Ben Franklin and David Morse's George Washington are wonderful. Stephen Dillane's Thomas Jefferson was a bit too reticent, I think, but that's a minor quibble. Although I found it very slow at times, it is very much worth seeing. The final episode was excellent. The portrayal of an early 1800s mastectomy was grueling to watch ... or think about for that matter. See it if you can.

135 days until football season ...

Quote of the Day

Half-fed slaves building our nation's Capitol. What possible good can come from such a place?

Abigail Adams, John Adams

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "Maybe the rest of you aren't reading the same economic news that I am. Because Festivus will say that the Federal Reserve is just a conspiracy theory and that we're really spending Confidence-backed Audacity Notes (hoping for change). And Harsh will say this is just a cyclical downturn, an extended correction, not a recession, and certainly not what we used to call an inflationary depression."

Patsy has been bugging me to see A Good Year since she recorded it a few weeks ago. I've resisted because I'm really not the biggest Russell Crowe fan even though I've liked him in everything I've seen him in. Add this one to that list. A Good Year is a thoroughly predictable light romantic comedy but it still works ... mainly because of Crowe but there are also super performances by Archie Panjabi, who plays his delightful assistant, and Isabelle Candelier, who plays his equally delightful housekeeper. Albert Finney turns in his usual reliable performance, too. I think he was born to be a great character actor. This is a fun movie and I may just have to watch it again.

Good to see Kansas and Memphis get wins yesterday even though it eliminated my brackets from contention. The sports pundits desperately wanted a NC/UCLA final.

Sorry. Had to say that.

Thinking about abandoning this blog and starting another here. Internal server errors still plague this one. Comment moderation is ON for that reason only. When I leave it on, there are no errors. I don't like that, though. All of the other CrabAppleLane blogs work fine. Movable Type says it's the server that's at issue and proved it to me by moving this entire installation to another server where everything works. I don't like getting chased from one server to another because of this so I'm thinking I'll just start a new one, use fewer categories, and abandon trackbacks. A new one would also necessitate a new URL and maybe the spammers will take a while to accumulate. They're still hammering this site. All of these steps should lighten the server load. It just annoys me that an obscure site such as this one has any kind of server load. This is just a thought at the moment. I have to decide on a server to move my domain to by November. I like Network Solutions except for this one issue.

CrabAppleLane Raccoons - April 6, 2008

Quote of the Day

I cannot work with this woman! Jamais! Never! I love her, she is like Henry ... with a nice ass.

Francis Duflot, A Good Year

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "I was re-energized and came back here to NY with a deeper appreciation for where I’m from. Somehow that has made NYC a friendlier place."

OK, I admit it. I was IN before I saw the trailer. I am a sucker for bigger-than-life adventure. Opening night now, I think. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull looks like another great installment. Too bad Denholm Elliott couldn't be in it.

I didn’t know what a “tag cloud” was but I kinda like it now that I have one. See the column to the far right towards the top. I’ve only tagged 2008 entries so far. As time permits, I’ll get to the rest of them.

A spectacular thunderstorm blew through CrabAppleLane last night as I was trying to get to sleep. Amazing that we didn’t lose power. We did lose our local HD channels on our DirecTV but resetting the receiver resolved that. The new DirecTV satellite systems are a little delicate in that regard. We seem to be resetting the receiver once or twice per week.

The spam flood I spoke of yesterday has abated considerably but I will leave comment moderation on for another day or two. I’ll check in periodically so that legitimate and valuable comments get published without much delay. No combination of keywords or filters could stop the spam and the majority of it was getting through and getting published.

Quote of the Day

I hate snakes, Jock. I hate 'em.

Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "Been a slow Indy news week since the release of the much anticipated trailer…which if you haven’t seen the international version, which is slightly different, check it out here at AICN. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been news."

We finally got through Once yesterday. I found it a little slow at first and we were both a little too tired to get through it Saturday night. I also found that both of the main characters spoke in very soft voices. There is music throughout the film so it was an exercise in volume control at CrabAppleLane. Turn up the volume to pick up what they were saying and turn down the volume when the music started blaring. It's a boy meets girl kind of story with some warm and quirky twists. The film doesn't even bother to name the two main characters. He's an Irishman living in Dublin. He works in his dad's Hoover repair shop in the city and is a street musician in his spare time. She is an immigrant from the Czech Republic who cleans houses. She lives in an apartment with her mother and daughter. They have no telephone but they have a TV. The three twenty-something guys next door, also immigrants, let themselves in to watch their TV and this is deemed normal. His father taught her to play piano. She can't afford a piano in Ireland because they're too expensive so she goes to a music shop where the owner lets her play. The story is about these two characters and the music they make. I liked the story much more than the music although some of the music was excellent. It's a good film.

Once again, Roger Ebert misses some details so thoroughly that I wonder if he's watching the film when he's in the theater. I've mentioned this before. From his review of Once:

"He takes her to a music store where he knows the owner, and they use a display piano."

"He" doesn't know the owner. "She" does. How could he miss that?

Comment moderation is turned ON at present because this entry is getting blistered with spam comments. I'll close comments on that entry in a few days and then I'll turn comment moderation OFF, too.

Quote of the Day

What's the Czech for "Do you love him"?

Guy, Once

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "These are grown in the wonderfully named town of Koonoomoo here in Victoria, probably as far away as you get from their homeland. They are being sold under the name of La Petite and as we found out from the grower, they are plums from the Aquitaine region of France."

Cool name for a blog. -Rob

The QOTD is dedicated to those who claim to hardly ever watch TV yet own a 60" high-definition flat screen or something similar or have a Netflix account. Seems to be a quite common dichotomy these days if it's true. I don't think it is. I don't believe them. Chance the Gardener is one of my favorite movie characters ever and I always think of him when someone tells me, "I don't watch much TV".

On tap later today (After a most excellent crawfish boil) at CrabAppleLane is Once. There's been a lot of buzz following this movie around and I hope that doesn't hurt the movie's chances with me. Although (And unfortunately) it's rare when I do, I prefer to have no expectations about movies.

Below the jump is a movie meme I got from Sheila who got it from Tracey. I've been avoiding/ignoring memes for a few months but I love movies so I did this one even though I wasn't invited. :) I'm using Tracey's rules because putting things in red is a bit problematic here. Update (11:35AM): Cullen also has a list and a cool thing he did with some of his movies was shamelessly stolen by yours truly. Another update (3/8/2008): Nightfly has one up, too. He has some catching up to do. I kinda envy him.

Quote of the Day

I like to watch TV

Chance, Being There

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "I've been seeing a lot more of this lately; Newspapers and magazines which have slashed or outright decimated their gardening content to the point where you can barely line a birdcage with the stuff, are now asking us to write their articles for them... for no pay... and they get to keep all rights to our submissions."

The next line in that blog entry is excellent, Very nice rant. I agree 100%. -Rob

The CrabAppleLane Saturday afternoon matinée yesterday was Michael Clayton. It was on DirecTV Pay-Per-View and included a Maltin Minute. I like everything Maltin says about George Clooney. The movies he makes between Batman and the Ocean movies are superb. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Out of Sight, and Syriana are excellent. Add Michael Clayton to that list. Excellent performances all around, particularly Tom Wilkinson, who plays a suddenly conscientious attorney. Wilkinson has one scene with Clooney where he goes from just outside of reality's grip right back into the moment with sharp lawyerly focus (See today's QOTD). It was an amazing delivery and he is absolutely convincing. Wilkinson and Clooney both play attorneys who consider themselves "janitors", because they essentially clean up their client's messes. There's another janitor of sorts in the film called Mr Verne. He "deals in absolutes". He is a truly frightening character that I hope doesn't exist in the real world. The only criticism I can level at Michael Clayton is that the ending tailed off from the rest of the film and was a little too "Hollywood" for my tastes. Still, I highly recommend it. The BOTD has a different take.

I offer two from the CrabAppleLane yard on this overcast, somewhat dreary Sunday:

CrabAppleLane Rest Stop - February 24, 2008

Sign of spring - February 24, 2008

Quote of the Day

Michael, I have great affection for you and you live a very rich and interesting life, but you're a bag man not an attorney. If your intention was to have me committed you should have kept me in Wisconsin where the arrest report, the videotape, eyewitness reports of my inappropriate behavior would have had jurisdictional relevance. I have no criminal record in the state of New York, and the single determining criteria for involuntary commitment is danger. Is the defendant a danger to himself or to others. You think you got the horses for that? Well good luck and God bless, but I'll tell you this: the last place you want to see me is in court.

Arthur Edens, Michael Clayton

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "Boring and contrived does not a good thriller make and the ordeal is certainly not helped by a George Clooney who seems to have mistaken weary for depth."

I watched two well done but pretty bleak movies this weekend. The first was Children of Men. This one tells a story of a world gone mad after a series of cataclysmic events. It's a world devoid of children. There have been no babies born in 18 years. No one knows why. A flu pandemic is mentioned but the rest of it is left to our imaginations with just a clue here and there being dropped for us to ponder. Great Britain is a police state that is trying to close their borders and round up all immigrants. There are rebel forces organizing an "uprising" against the police state. Clive Owen tries to navigate all of this with a woman who can do something that hasn't been done in 18 years: Give birth ... and hope, I suppose. The movie is very well done as I said but rather bleak. The film doesn't have much faith in government or humanity. I still liked it. Great soundtrack.

The next one I watched was Breach. Patsy watched this one with me and was surprisingly engrossed by it. She doesn't usually like spy movies. This one is based on the true story of Robert Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage. Chris Cooper plays Hanssen as paranoid and enigmatic. He is not at all likable in this. The film wisely didn't go into the whys of what he was doing. Most of what I had read in news accounts of this story were included in the film. I had read about his desire for an exit plan from his handlers and that he secretly videotaped his wife and himself making love and passed the tape around. I'm not sure how much of the rest of it is true and how much was embellished to suit Hollywood. This film is very well done.

Quote of the Day

As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd, what happens in a world without children's voices.

Miriam, Children of Men

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "I still feel strongly that Universal has taken a bad beat on the accusations that they are burying a film that could easily sell."