This is a very silly movie. It is absurdly gratuitous.
Archive for the ‘movies’ Category
Beerfest
Should I be embarrassed that I enjoyed this movie?
Ever since Super Troopers (another film I rarely own up to liking) I’ve vowed to watch all the Broken Lizard films as they arrive. I was disappointed by Club Dread. And, truthfully, Beerfest isn’t really all that great.
Nevertheless, I’ve been a bit unhappy lately, and I really needed to see a silly movie about a secret beer drinking contest. And, what luck — there’s one in the theaters!
Miami Vice
As I left the theater, an albino guy was sitting by the bike racks, smoking a cigarette. As I passed he said, “that was a movie with no soul”.
And though it was interesting, at times gripping, and darker than the series — yeah.
Normally a good soulless movie reminds me not to be too complacent: sitting in Boulder, hacking on free software all day, it is pretty easy to engage with my problems, personal or profressional, and neglect some of the wider issues.
But, soulless isn’t what these “fear up” times call for, and so to me this movie struck a discordant note. I don’t need to see soulless, I’m soaking in it.
A Scanner Darkly
I went through a Philip K. Dick phase shortly after college. I still have all his books sitting on a shelf here at home. I’ve been generally disappointed by the films made from PKD’s books, with the exception of Blade Runner — though that really doesn’t resemble the book much and should be considered as a completely separate work of art. (Oh, ok, “Barjo” is also a reasonable adaptation, but it is not one of PKD’s better-known — or even science fiction — stories.)
A Scanner Darkly is an excellent adaptation. It is very close to what I recall of the original book. The choice of turning the film into a kind of animation works very well for this story. The story deals with addicts whose view of reality slowly skews, and the animation sometimes lets us feel this, as objects occasionally float oddly against their backgrounds.
Robert Downey is great in this movie. But as I’ve said before I love the crazed raconteur style. He excels at it here; some scenes (like the bicycle scene) had me laughing and rocking back and forth in my chair. (It was mildly awkward since I was sitting between a coworker and a coworker’s friend, and I didn’t know them very well…) Maybe this stuff is only funny if you knew a bunch of stoners back in the day.
Overall though I didn’t connect to the movie as well as I did with the book. (Lesson to filmmakers: it is probably better not to stick to closely to the book. These comparisons rarely go in the film’s favor.) While the comedy scenes were great, the more serious parts of the film seemed a bit flat. Also it was a bit hard to get inside the characters’ heads, so even though I knew what was going on, it still didn’t quite add up.
Nevertheless I’d recommend it.