I respectfully disagree

The following was a comment on my Sept. 8 post:

"Anonymous said...

A good trailer can sell me on a movie, and a perfect trailer evokes emotional responses to images without excessive revelation.

There should be no comma there."

Anonymous, I disagree that the comma should be removed. There are places where commas can be inserted or left out and the resulting sentence is correct either way. I believe this is one of those places. Commas are meant to inflict pause in the reader and that was my goal while writing the sentence. Similarly, I could've replaced the comma with a semicolon and removed the conjunction "and." This would have created the same pause. Either way, the sentence is correct. Thanks for your input.

I watched Underworld: Evolution. On one hand, I'm glad there's a solid set of movies about a war between vampires and werewolves; on the other hand, I wish it was more down-to-earth and less excessive in its use of gore. Just because you can make a special effect of someone's torso sliding off a cliff doesn't mean you should. An example of a good violence shot would be Wolverine slashing the guy across the face in X2. It's brief, you see what happens, and you don't see the guy's face bits spraying everywhere. In Romeo Must Die, however, when someone breaks a bone, the camera zooms into their body to show the point of fracture.

Movies can allude to violence without painting the screen red. Gory horror films are exempt from this criteria, because obviously gore has a place there. Gore does not have a place in action movies. Imagine if, instead of a staff, Neo used a machete in his fight against 100 Agent Smiths in The Matrix: Reloaded, and the animators rendered all the blood and organs that would spill out of the Smiths. If the same people who worked on Underworld: Evolution made this scene, that would've happened. I hope that example helped illustrate my idea to any of you who didn't appreciate the X2 and Romeo Must Die comparison because those movies have different MPAA ratings. Unfortunately I just remembered how gory Kill Bill Vol. 1 was, and that somewhat revokes my assertion that action movies shouldn't be gory, but let's call that a special case so I can wrap this up without getting into all the exceptions.

Thanking Hollywood

I wanted to write more about intriguing movie premises in my last post but I was cut short by Robot Chicken. There are many more movies that draw attention based on their concepts, and I'll mention a few now.

Pennies from Heaven is a musical from 1981, long after musicals stopped being prolific, which stars Steve Martin as a salesman during the Depression who has kinky sex fetishes. There are other details of the movie that I won't reveal because their revelation is half the fun; suffice it to say, the bright, flashy musical numbers are juxtaposed by the somber, disturbing subject matter, which makes Pennies from Heaven unique and surprising. Also, Christopher Walken has a dance number, for those of you who probably think they should digitally replace Ben Kingsley with Walken in Gandhi, and change all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park into giant Christopher Walkens.

Another film with a bizarrely noteworthy premise is Wolf, a horror movie from 1994 starring Jack Nicholson as a publisher who gets bitten by a werewolf and slowly transforms into one. If you've ever wanted to see Nicholson and James Spader have a werewolf battle, this will probably be your only chance.

I've never seen Bugsy Malone, but I know it's a gangster movie from 1976 in which children, including a young Jodie Foster, play all the adult roles. That alone makes it rentworthy, for me.

Finally, Mr. Brooks is a movie scheduled to come out in March of next year. It's a thriller starring Kevin Costner as "a man who is sometimes controlled by his murder-and-mayhem-loving alter ego" (source: IMDB) played by William Hurt. That sounds weird, and badass.

I know this has sounded like some goddamn Entertainment Weekly fall movie preview, but I have a point. I'm thankful that Hollywood puts out strange films like these with daring premises because pedestrian stuff like Taking Lives and Underworld is nice filler but it doesn't stand out. I suppose I'm also thankful to average filler movies for allowing diamonds in the rough like Pennies from Heaven to shine.

Whoops forgot to title this

I watched Boxing Helena the other night. It's a movie about a surgeon who obsesses over this stuck-up one-night-stand bitch so he cuts off her arms and legs and traps her in his house. By the end of the movie they fall in love.

There are some movies I'm compelled to see based on a single fact; for instance, this movie was a serious film about a guy who dismembers a woman and still manages to seduce her. That's too intriguing to pass up. I'd also like to see the 1986 TV version of Babes in Toyland because Keanu Reeves plays Jack-be-Nimble.

It's time to watch some Robot Chicken.

Goosebumps

I watched the latest full trailer for Casino Royale tonight, it knocked my socks off. I can't remember getting that giddy over a trailer since the first Reloaded teaser before Attack of the Clones. If Casino Royale is half as good as its trailer, it'll knock one of my socks off.

I've seen trailers on the other end of the spectrum as well, trailers that resemble fan-made montages set to pedantic music. It makes me wonder who edits trailers and if there are a handful of well-renown trailer arists who are responsible for all the best ones, such as Closer, Hard Candy, High Tension, that one MI:3 trailer, X-Men 3 and even that Independence Day teaser. A good trailer can sell me on a movie, and a perfect trailer evokes emotional responses to images without excessive revelation. If you've ever watched a trailer and said to yourself "Man, that just gave away the entire movie," that was a bad trailer.

Giving in to temptation

I consider myself a private person, so creating a blog seems contradictory, but I want to do it and life is short so here I am. If I can stick to reporting on mundane events in my life without going into personal detail, this will become an exercise in composition without compromising my values.

I also hope to abstain from posting too much, because I have a lot of free time and can foresee that becoming a pitfall.

Another obvious benefit of having a blog is the opportunity to editorialize, something I have experience with. Ideally, editorials are researched and edited for libel, but we'll see about that.

On a side note, I'm a copy editor, so I'm creating a game in which anyone who finds a grammatical or spelling error in my posts gets recognized in my blog. You must post errors you find in the comments section of the appropriate post. Thank God I have better spelling and grammar cents than most of you.