Category: Random movie stuff (Page 1 of 3)

Ah, the Academy Award silly season is here already. As usual, my only real interest here is for best foreign film. And my top choice among this year’s nominees is …

Oh, that’s right — there isn’t a category for foreign film. Just “foreign language” film. But governed by the most arcane, backward set of rules possible. One nominee per country … So if it is a “foreign language” category, why bother restricting nominees by nation?

Anyhow, the Oscars are shite and we’re all idiots for paying attention.

This is kind of odd (not really funny, but kind of interesting). Someone has taken the most famous fight scene from Park Chan-wook’s OLDBOY and redone it so Oh Dae-su fights the evil bankers/businessmen who caused the American/world’s economy to tank over the past couple of years.

So I checked out TRANSFORMERS 2: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN over the weekend. And I must say, I agree with popular opinions — both of them, the critics and the unwashed masses. TRANSFORMERS 2 is definitely stupid and ridiculous, at any level a terrible film. I also quite liked it.

Which seems to be how people in general are perceiving the film. Critics hate it, but audiences think it is much better than the first TRANSFORMERS.

That article I linked to points out that it is Michael Bay’s worst film ever on Rotten Tomatoes, the review aggregator. But what I find really interesting is that is is also Bay’s second-best reviewed film ever on Metacritic (behind THE ROCK). Rotten Tomatoes, of course, merely looks at whether reviewers liked a film, then averages the number of positive votes. Metacritic, on the other hand, assigns a value to each vote, then takes that average.

So what does that mean? It means that most critics on balance dislike TRANSFORMERS 2, but they do not dislike it that much. But for Bay’s previous films, opinions were more divided, with some people liking them more but others hating them more.

Math is so much fun.

A bad couple of days of the inner-nerd — both Ricardo Montalban and Patrick McGoohan have passed away. Both actors had long, prestigious careers… But I don’t know much about that because I loved them for their work on my nerdy cult-classic favorites.

Montalban played the dastardly Khan Noonien Singh from Star Trek, once in the original TV series and once in the movies — STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, of course. The television episode was fun, but it was the Star Trek movie that so impressed me (and so many nerds of my generation).

McGoohan has a slightly brainier role in a more obscure but much more important classic — the 17-episode series THE PRISONER. Each week, McGoohan’s character, No. 6, would try to escape from a mysterious island populated with former spies.

And the opening sequence was one of TV’s all-time greats.

“I am not a number — I am a free man!”

and

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered!

But for me, the great exchange from the opening was when No. 6 and No. 2 were talking, and No. 6 tried to figure out what was going on:

Because all it took was a little comma to totally change the meaning:

Be seeing you…

Oh my god. The trailer is out for WATCHMEN. You can have your DARK KNIGHT. You can enjoy your THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD. But this trailer for WATCHMEN is absolutely gorgeous. And it looks exactly like the comic book.

Now, if only someone would make MIRACLEMAN into a movie…

The Twitch website has dug up a five-minute promo from Tran Ahn Hung’s I COME WITH THE RAIN. Apparently they found it at Daum, but their link appears to be faster, so that is what I am using.

Judging by the promo, this could be one good-looking movie. But what makes it more relevant to me is that you get a few glimpses of the gangster being played by Lee Byung-hun.

When I talked to Lee last year, it was right just before he went to Hong Kong to shoot the film. He was in the middle of a months-long workout/ low-carb program to buff up for the role. You can see the results around the four-minute mark.

Click on the above link to see the promo, or you can just watch it below: