Posters of the apocalypse

We love movies about the end of the world, don't we?

Even if we know there's a high likelihood they will suck, our excitement overwhelms us -- doesn't it?

But I'm wondering if that phenomenon wouldn't be half as powerful without a tradition of truly captivating posters ... which, a lot of times, were for movies that really sucked.

It remains to be seen what we'll think of Battle: Los Angeles, but I can tell you that the poster you see above absolutely thrilled me. It perfectly accomplishes what posters for apocalyptic movies set out to do -- it provides a single-image encapsulation of the idea of normal life supplanted by chaos. What better way to indicate "business as usual" turned upside down, than surfers waiting for the next big wave as aliens rain the heavens with artillery fire?

It's that mixture of everyday things we recognize and exotic things we don't recognize that makes the image so powerful. And that's why I think the poster for Battle: LA you see below is not as effective:

Sure, there's a basic impressiveness here: A single soldier stands and looks at ... something. We don't know what. And that's part of the problem. Is it an alien craft? Is it a chunk of land turned up on its side, and the spiky objects we're seeing are buildings or other parts of the industrial landscape? We can't really tell. It still makes me want to see the movie, but not the way the surfing poster makes me want to see the movie.

So I thought today it would be fun to go back and look at other posters of the apocalypse, and to dissect how they used familiar images to whet our appetite for the movie in question ... and whether that whetted appetite ended up resulting in a satisfying movie.

Let's start with the most recent obvious example, which also has a whole series of posters associated with it:

2012 (2009, Roland Emmerich)


These posters are, frankly, perfect. They are ludicrous at the same time that they are somehow deliciously plausible. Waves crashing over the Himalayas? Not on your life would that ever happen. But would I like to see a movie where it happens? Yup, I think so. Emmerich et al were also smart to use the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil, since it has a basic awesomeness that is enhanced by collapsing under the weight of a tidal wave. The final image is interesting to me, referencing the most orgiastic destruction depicted in the movie, when plate tectonics rip apart the west side of Los Angeles. It's interesting because there's a billboard for Battle: Los Angeles that features the same section of town, with those artillery blasts from the surfing poster above -- I'm wondering if that's an intentional allusion (or else direct theft) from the 2012 advertising campaign.

Was it worth it? I thought so, yes. The destruction was great on its own terms, and just removed enough that you didn't have to ponder the billions of people who were dying. Some criticized the movie for that very reason, and for dozens of other reasons, not the least of which is that they have a knee-jerk hatred for everything made by Roland Emmerich. I did previously as well, but this one really worked for me. And speaking of Emmerich ...

The Day After Tomorrow (2004, Roland Emmerich)


Emmerich tried to capitalize on our fears of climate change with The Day After Tomorrow, and this poster was a good start. The Statue of Liberty, up to her nose in snow? My God! AND IT MAY BE HAPPENING AS SOON AS TWO DAYS FROM NOW!

Was it worth it? Not really. The Day After Tomorrow was silly. I was able to appreciate it only on the level of seeing some of the special effects, but to be honest, the catastrophic phenomenon depicted here does not lend itself to effects the way some of his other phenomena do. In fact, the scene I remember most was where tornadoes were ripping apart Los Angeles, which doesn't even really jive with the rest of the movie. Emmerich basically threw it in there because he could. And speaking of uses of the Statue of Liberty ...

Cloverfield (2008, Matt Reeves)


The Day After Tomorrow poster shows only the statue's head, while this poster shows only the statue's body -- because the head has been ripped off its shoulders by a giant reptilian alien. The smart thing about the Cloverfield poster is that it reminds everyone of their first exposure to the movie, which was that great teaser trailer that went viral in late 2007, in which the final shot is the statue's head coming to a rest in the street somewhere, uptown from Liberty Island. The events depicted in Cloverfield may not lead to the end of the world, but who knows ... they may.

Was it worth it? HELLS yes. Cloverfield was awesome. I got it on BluRay for Christmas and am looking forward to my third viewing. And speaking of the Statue of Liberty again ...

Planet of the Apes (1968, Franklin J. Schaffner)


Of course, all these other movies' usages of the Statue of Liberty owe a debt to how it was used as a gut punch at the end of Planet of the Apes. Having this iconic image sunken into the sand just killed us -- and by "us," I mean people who saw it in the theater, which does not include me, as I was not born for another five years.

Was it worth it? Well, duh -- Planet of the Apes is a classic. However, I have to wonder if this poster was used to advertise it at the time, or only in retrospect. I'm thinking retrospect. Given that it was a highly guarded secret that this ape planet was Earth, intended to Shyamalan us 30 years before Shyamalan, I doubt they would have revealed it in the original advertising campaign. But back to Roland Emmerich ...

Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich)


Emmerich first started blowing up the world back in 1996, with Independence Day. Talk about making it personal for us -- the White House getting blasted by an alien laser beam became the signature image of the film. And there's something about when you get to the president, who should be untouchable, that really strikes a chord with us. In fact, you could say that the White House bit worked so well, Emmerich intentionally alluded to it in 2012 with the scene where the capsized battleship flattens the White House, after riding on the crest of a tidal wave. That one scene is like every exciting thing from every disaster movie, rolled into one. (The Empire State building poster looks nicer and is good, too -- and certainly wouldn't have been possible post-9/11).

Was it worth it? I am not a fan of Independence Day. But I did like those few scenes with maximum possible destruction. They lived up to what I was expecting. And speaking of tidal waves ...

Deep Impact (1998, Mimi Leder)


Both asteroid movies that came out in 1998 were all about the tidal wave that was going to destroy the world, but only Deep Impact emphasized these in the ad campaign, while Armageddon focused more on the heroic and patriotic oil riggers-turned-astronauts. Although this poster cheeses it up a bit by showing the human drama implied by the world's coastal regions being violently drenched, the sight of the wave bearing down on New York City captures the situation pretty well.

Was it worth it? Yeah, I really liked Deep Impact -- in part because of the human drama I just poked fun at a minute ago. What can I say, I'm a sap. I should probably see it again to be sure, but I really liked it.

Okay, this post is getting long, so let's hurry through these last couple:

The Core (2003, Jon Amiel)


Talk about preposterous ... the idea behind The Core was that the Earth's core had stopped, and some scientists/adventurers had to drill into it to jump-start it. This presented all kinds of visual problems about how to represent the threat, and what they ended up with was merely adequate. Not only is the part of the Earth's surface shown in this image too abstract to make out, making the threat abstract as well, but the deep fissure depicted here is not actually the outcome of the threat -- more than anything else, it shows the hole they'd have to burrow to get down to the core.

Was it worth it? Hopefully the abstract advertisements kept people away, because this movie was not good. However, not knowing exactly where the threat is did not matter here ...

The Day After (1986, Nicholas Meyer)


This is cheating a little bit -- The Day After was a TV movie rather than a theatrical release, so our appetite for it was not whetted by a poster. In fact, this image probably accompanied the eventual video release. But the nuclear blast in the middle of an American city is so effective that it doesn't really matter which city it is -- though I believe the action was set around Kansas City.

Was it worth it? To this day I still identify The Day After with all my fears of nuclear annihilation. It was damn effective.

I had a couple more I was going to do, but all the image files attached to this post were causing Blogger to act funny -- images disappearing (possibly being "behind" other images), etc. So I'll just leave off there. You've had enough. I'll let you off the hook.

Busiest release date ... ever?

If there's one governing principle we should all know about release dates, it's that they amount to one big game of chicken.

If two movies with ambitions to win the weekend are announced as scheduled for the same release date, and they appeal to a similar demographic, it's a battle of wills to see which will yield. One always does -- this is why you don't ever see two superhero movies released on the same date.

The conventional wisdom is that the movie that yields is the lesser commodity, but it doesn't always work out that way. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip got all the buzz when it debuted in the fall of 2006. Meanwhile, everyone expected Tina Fey's dopey little sitcom -- 30 Rock, which debuted about three weeks later -- to get left in the dust. Needless to say, it didn't work out that way. (How's that for a loose analogy? Especially since it's about TV rather than the movies, when "release dates" are not really relevant, but especially since both shows were the property of NBC?)

But even when the demographics targeted are not the same, movies with high expectations will still try to avoid direct competition with one another, especially on a weekend when something hot is coming out. Hot is hot, regardless of who it's intended for.

And so it is that a release date like tomorrow is quite unusual. None of the four major films being released this Friday are targeting the exact same audience, but they are all prominent enough in some way to be considered "hot." Whether they will cannibalize each other, or whether a victor will rise to the top, remains uncertain. What is pretty likely is that someone's going to go home unhappy.

Shall we take a look?

Red Riding Hood
Directed by: Catherine Hardwicke
Targeting: Teenage girls and dirty old men
Comment: Don't discount those dirty old men, who are just waiting for that moment of bodice-ripping by star Amanda Seyfried. (The ads make the movie look pretty sultry, and don't tell me there isn't something sexual about those thorns "penetrating" Seyfried in this poster.) This is clearly aimed at Twilight's audience -- I mean, Hardwicke even directed the original Twilight -- but don't be surprised to see it do better than your average movie that tries to ride the Twilight coattails. It's getting some interest outside its demographic, including from me. (Let's not ponder too closely whether I belong in that "dirty old men" group.)
Prediction for weekend box office: Third

Jane Eyre
Directed by: Cary Joji Fukunaga
Targeting: Intelligent teenage girls and intellectuals of all ages
Comment: I'd like to think this will do better than it will actually do. Even with two pretty hot properties in the central roles -- Alice in Wonderland's Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender -- my thinking is that this outside-the-box version of Jane Eyre will not be seen by as many people as I'd hope. That's too bad, because it's got an exciting director: Cary Fukunaga, who directed the excellent Sin Nombre two years ago.
Prediction for weekend box office: Seventh

Battle: Los Angeles
Directed by: Jonathan Liebesman
Targeting: Fourteen-year-old boys and Republicans
Comment: Aliens, explosions, end of the world ... it's a winning formula at the box office. Especially this one, which seems like it could be the first film to really benefit from the success of District 9. Like Neill Blomkamp's film, Battle: Los Angeles is shot like a documentary, giving it a gritty realism that viewers really want from their effects-laden action movies. (The documentary form has the effect of making the effects seem almost hyper-real.)
Prediction for weekend box office: First

Mars Needs Moms
Directed by: Simon Wells
Targeting: Children and stoners
Comment: As much as animation tends to do well, I'm not sure if this particular animated film will find great success. It hasn't been advertised very well, and space can be a tough fit for animated movies ... perhaps especially when there is another movie featuring aliens (Battle: Los Angeles) being released on the same day. Not only that, but Mars Needs Moms has to contend with Rango, which should be getting most of the kids who didn't see it the first weekend. (Even if Mars Needs Moms will probably be more appropriate for young kids than Rango.)
Prediction for weekend box office: Fourth

Other two top-five box office spots not yet mentioned: Second (Rango), Fifth (The Adjustment Bureau)

I don't do a lot of box office predicting on this blog, but I'll be curious to see how this one turns out. And really tearing my hear out deciding which one to see ... though, let's be honest, the 14-year-old boy in me will be standing in line for Battle: LA. (Leaving the dirty old man on the outside looking in.)

Too much parody vs. too little parody

Fulfilling a promise I made to a recently deceased Leslie Nielsen, I finally watched my copy of Dracula: Dead and Loving It on Sunday afternoon.

You know, it wasn't that bad. I understand the impulse to rake Mel Brooks and Nielsen over the coals for this movie, but to be honest, Nielsen made a dozen movies that were worse than this. (You have no idea how many movies he made in the late 1990s and early 2000s that you've never heard of.) Brooks may not have made that many that were worse, but he certainly made one or two.

However, I freely admit that my limited affection for Dracula: Dead and Loving It may just be relative, when you compare it to what passes for parody in these here modern times of ours.

Yes, I am going to shit on Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer yet again on my blog.

Friedberg and Seltzer, the writer-directors of such landfill as Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and Vampires Suck, are irritating because of their many sins of commission. A movie like Dracula: Dead and Loving It is notable for its omissions, not its commissions.

Put differently: Epic Movie tries way too hard, while Dracula doesn't try hard enough. And in this case, I vastly prefer the latter sin.

When you think of Mel Brooks, you may think of a guy who is terminally goofy, willing to try anything for a laugh. But he's really quite restrained compared to Friedberg and Seltzer. Brooks at least confines his jokes, relatively speaking, to the context of his plot. There may be the occasional anachronism in his movies, sure, but it's nothing compared to Alice in Wonderland showing up in the middle of a vampire movie. (Which happens in Vampires Suck. Friedberg and Seltzer have done far worse, but that one is fresh in my memory from an unfortunate recent viewing.)

You might say that anachronisms are the raison d'etre for Seltzer and Friedberg, the more off-the-wall, the better. This gets old, fast. But it's what they have to do, since they're determined to end every single shot on a joke. (Note: calling it "what they have to do" is not, for a moment, endorsing anything about their method.)

And that's what I really noticed as I was watching Dracula: Dead and Loving It: Some scenes just ended, without what appeared to be a joke. To some people, that's the very definition of why it isn't a good movie. To me, it brought relief -- relief that the movie takes itself seriously enough not to strain for humor when it just isn't there.

I guess the fact that I noticed it means that they were doing something wrong. And I'm not going to try to tell you that Dracula is in the same league as The Naked Gun (if we're looking at Nielsen movies) or Blazing Saddles (if we're looking at Brooks movies). But it is in the same league as Naked Gun 33 1/3 (Nielsen) or High Anxiety (Brooks) -- which is to say, not great, but worth a watch.

What I like most about Brooks' approach relative to the approach of the Two-Headed Monster (I will refer to them as such from here on out) is that Brooks' approach doesn't date itself. If the Two-Headed Monster had been making Dracula: Dead and Loving It, it would have come across less as a parody of Bram Stoker's famous novel, and more as a parody of the pop culture landscape circa 1995. Which would make it really fun to watch in 2011.

But since the humor in Dracula was almost entirely driven by the scenario, I was able to laugh at it, from time to time, in 2011. Sure, it's not high comedy when Lucy (Lysette Anthony) closes her balcony door, and a bat with Nielsen's head slams face first into a pane of glass. But at least the humor flows organically from the situation.

I did not laugh at the bat-into-the-glass gag, but I did laugh at the following jokes:

1) When Dracula (Nielsen) removes his goofy heart-shaped hairdo, revealing it to be just a "hair hat";

2) When Harker (Steven Weber) gets repeatedly doused by sprays of blood from Lucy's corpse, as he drives a stake through her chest. The sprays of blood alone are funny, but Weber's line deliveries during this scene are priceless;

3) When Renfield (Peter MacNicol) eats all manner of bugs while at a dinner with Dr. Seward (Harvey Korman). I think Peter MacNicol may have been born to play Renfield;

4) When Van Helsing (Brooks) and Dracula have a battle to see who can get in the last word, each prolonging the conversation by throwing down one last Yiddish word as an exclamation point. This bit has a funny payoff in the film's final shot;

5) When the sun melts Dracula at the end, leaving only a bat-shaped pile of ashes on the floor. Renfield gathers the ashes into a neat little pile and draws a smiley face in it. "There, master, you're starting to look like your old self again."

And those are just the times I can remember.

When you legitimately laugh (or "LOL") during a movie at least five times, that means it was worth watching.

I haven't legitimately laughed five times in all the movies I've seen by the Two-Headed Monster -- combined.

I'm glad I got a laugh or two (or five) from Dracula: Dead and Loving It, if only because it's nice to come across a Nielsen movie I hadn't seen that's better than Wrongfully Accused or 2001: A Space Travesty. (I saved you the trouble and saw both, thank you very much.) Seeing his smiling face in the "In Memoriam" section at the Oscars just whetted my appetite for this unique funnyman, all of whose best work I thought I'd already seen.

No, Dracula is not among his best -- but it didn't make me cringe either, and that's a small victory worth applauding.

Could TV be radio?

Over the time I've been writing my blog, I've thought of a number of posts that deal with the similarities and differences between movies and TV. I've touched on the issue now and then, but I've left most of my thoughts unexplored ... until now.

The event that spurred me to finally write down some of my thoughts was the realization, over the weekend, that my wife and I have different standards for when we give the TV screen 100% of our attention.

We both have scenarios where we like to be on our laptops at the same time we're watching TV. But the scenarios are different. These are not absolutes, but generally speaking, she doesn't mind being distracted when she's watching a movie, while I don't mind being distracted when I'm watching a TV show.

To some extent, this dovetails with what each of us would prefer to watch. My wife would prefer to watch TV. This is not because she likes TV better than movies, though her affection for the two is a lot closer than it is for me. No, it has to do with her paranoia that our DVR will fill up if we don't keep up with our shows, which is a legitimate concern. Me? I'd almost always rather be watching a movie. I love my TV, but if left to my own devices, I would watch a movie over a TV show any day. (And I am more comfortable than I should be when our DVR hovers around 90% full, which is also telling. Though paradoxically, I'm the one who refuses to give up on certain marginal TV shows, like The Event, when she's perfectly happy to cut the cord.)

Naturally, I think my perspective on which medium to give my full attention is more enlightened. And I'm here today to present my reasoning.

See, I think TV is primarily an audio medium, while movies are primarily a visual medium.

In other words, if you have to do one or the other, it's more important to hear TV, while it's more important to see a movie. In many cases, you'd be pretty lost in either medium if you were missing, respectively, the picture or the sound. But my contention is that you can ignore visual information on TV shows and still get pretty much everything that's going on -- this despite the fact that TV shows are becoming more like movies all the time. According to me, you're likely to lose a lot more by only half-watching a movie.

Of course, a lot of this stuff is genre dependent. An undemanding cinematic comedy is probably a lot closer to my definition of a TV show than some TV shows, whereas a dense TV show -- say, Lost -- would require your undivided attention a lot more than that undemanding comedy. But I think generally speaking, this idea holds true.

Why? It gets at another of my ideas about the differences between TV and movies: With TV shows, it's most important to know what happened. With movies, it's more important to know how it happened.

Case in point: We can watch a movie about Aron Rolston, who had to cut off his own arm to survive, without any problem. It doesn't matter that we already know the ending -- we want to know how the story is told. But if 127 Hours were a TV show, it wouldn't work, would it? You wouldn't sit through episode after episode after episode of 127 Hours: The TV Show -- you know, kind of like 24, only with a lot less nuclear terrorism -- if you knew Ralston was going to free himself in the end.

And there are numerous other examples of stories that work as movies but not TV shows. We repeatedly watch different filmed versions of Hamlet, even though we already know which characters will die at the end. But Hamlet has never been turned into a teen soap opera on the CW. (Fox actually came close once with a show called Skin, which starred Ron Silver as a porn magnate and a then-unknown Olivia Wilde as his daughter.) It's the same reason why movies, generally speaking, have more repeat watching value than TV shows. You can watch the how any number of times, but the what only needs to be watched once.

But circling back to my original point ... because TV shows are so heavy on plot, they rely heavily on the audio, requiring a lot of expository dialogue. Hearing the dialogue is usually more important to your experience of the program than seeing the expressions on the actors' faces as they speak their lines, or seeing other visual information presented at the same time. That's because there usually isn't any other visual information. In order to keep a viewer interested week after week, TV shows need to get straight into the plot and stay focused on it, at the expense of camera tricks, quick edits, or other aspects of the movies we are so accustomed to.

More than anything this might explain why David Lynch had to make Mulholland Drive into a movie. It was originally envisioned as a TV show, but its abstractions -- I imagine it was far more abstract than Lynch's relatively straightforward Twin Peaks -- required the medium of cinema. Only in film can you toy with the audience and stay unstructured. Only a film can "have no plot" and still be potentially worth watching.

Considering this, it's easy for me to understand why I get agitated when my wife is on her computer while we're watching a movie. Or why I get stressed out when she runs to the bathroom at the theater. It's not simply a matter of catching her up on the plot she may have missed. I have to remember if there was some subtle camera trick that told us something imperceptible about the motivations of a certain character. I have to remember if a date flashed across the screen. I have to remember if there was a quick montage of images that told you something about the character's past. A movie is dense with all this information. A TV show, generally speaking, is not.

So is TV basically like radio?

That could be taking it too far. But I'd be interested to "watch" a procedural cop show while wearing a blindfold, to see if my appreciation of it were significantly impacted. I'm guessing it would not be.

It's funny in this discussion how I'm privileging seeing over hearing. If one medium does one sense better, and the other medium does the other sense better, shouldn't that balance out?

Except not really, because we already privilege the visual by saying you are supposed to "show, don't tell." Could that be because if you asked someone which sense they'd rather lose -- sight or hearing -- almost all people would pick hearing? Sight is more essential to how we get around in the world. Hearing is useful too, but it ain't no sight. (Yeah, tell that to a music lover. I guess that's why I'm a bigger film fan than music fan, though I love both.)

In movies, we want as much information as possible to be communicated visually.

Otherwise, you might as well just be watching TV ... or listening to the radio.

Teaching kids to say the f-word

Is it just me, or are animated films involved in some kind of conspiracy to insinuate, use replacements for, and in all other ways put the word "fuck" into kids' minds?

This occurred to me as I was waiting for Rango to start on Saturday afternoon, when two straight trailers alluded to the word "fuck" without actually saying it.

First it was the newest trailer for Rio -- which, darn it, I can't find online -- in which the bird played by George Lopez says "Yippee Ki Yay [something something]." (See, that's why I needed to find the trailer.) Suffice it to say that he says a four-syllable phrase beginning with "M." That is, of course, an allusion to Die Hard, in which Bruce Willis famously says "Yippee Ki Yay, Motherfucker!"

The second was the newest trailer for Kung Fu Panda 2, in which the word "freakin'" makes several appearances. The word "freakin'" or "freaking" would not exist at all if it weren't being used as a non-vulgar substitute for "fucking."

You might say this isn't much evidence. In the first instance, you have to have actually seen Die Hard to get that the word "fuck" is being referenced. In the second, if you haven't heard the word "fucking" before, you have no idea that "freaking" is a cleaner synonym.

But we parents ... we get both of them, don't we? And it does make a person wonder.

And then, when Rango started, the allusions to swear words came fast and furious. I don't know about you, but when I grew up, I learned that these were the swear words: hell, damn, bitch, shit, ass and fuck. Yeah, there are words that are worse than all of these, that aren't technically swears, and at least half of these curse words can freely be said on television ("shit" and "fuck" being the only definite exceptions, and you can even say "shit" on basic cable now). But I think we can generally agree that none of them have a real place in a children's movie, right?

Well, I counted at least three instances of one of these words, either said or alluded to. When the hawk attacks Rango and that other lizard in the desert, and ends up grabbing the other lizard and flying off, you hear the other lizard curse Rango's name as he disappears into the sky: "You son of a biiiiiii ..." He doesn't get the whole word out, so it's okay. Then later on, the word "hell" is spoken at least twice. The first of which is really chilling, and may be the single clearest indication that this movie is not appropriate for young kids. The villain Rattlesnake Jake makes the following threat: "I'll send your soul straight to hell!" Yeah, I bet some kids were asking their parents about that one. Then the heroine, a lizard named Beans, tells Jake later on to "go to hell." Relatively tame by comparison.

I'm no prude -- not in the least. (If I were, would I have written out the word "fuck" eight times in this post already? Make that nine.) I just like to point out apparent hypocrisies when I see them. Here you have three children's movies that are, I'm sure, being embraced by conservative parents' groups everywhere, and each is doing its damnnedest (pun intended) to give their children a potty mouth.

But maybe it's much simpler than I'm making it out to be. Maybe those groups talk the talk about keeping young minds in pristine condition, but they don't really want to walk the walk. Maybe they really want their kids to learn these words.

Think about it. How much easier would it be if children could learn the bad language they're eventually going to learn, now, and just get it out of the way?

Parents would no longer have to worry about what their kids are watching on TV. They'd no longer have to wonder if the music their kids listen to contains explicit lyrics. Most importantly, they'd no longer have to worry about the words coming out of their own mouths. I think it's safe to say that a lot of us like dropping an f-bomb now and again, regardless of whether we're churchgoing folk, new-age liberals, or somewhere in between. If the kids knew those words already, it would let us all off the hook.

I'm obviously being a little bit disingenuous when I say this. It's straight-up bad parenting to not care what your kids watch or listen to, because it's not the word itself that is usually the problem, but an undercurrent of violence the word may suggest, in the context it is being used. We probably observe a difference between the way "fuck" comes out of our own mouths and the way it comes out of the mouths of gangsta rappers. At least when it's us saying it, we can control the context.

Still, I think it's interesting to note the way animated films are pushing their own standards of decency, just as the other parts of the entertainment world are doing the same. In the interest of making the movie seem like it speaks to adults -- and Rango may actually speak to adults more than it does to kids -- the writers want to give the movie some clear-cut adult content, or at least content that adults recognize is intended for them. The surest way to do that is something like the "Yippee Ki Yay" line in Rio, which will be entirely over the heads of children, but work as a wink to their parents. At some level it is simply a calculated attempt to get a higher box office. The best path to a good box office is when you can also get people to go without their kids -- like I did on Saturday.

I guess it's probably a freakin' good idea.

The greatness scale

Rango was quite good.

But that's as far as I'm willing to go.

It has a dynamite first half full of exciting set pieces, and it loses the plot a little bit in the second half. That averages out to ... quite good.

See, I was thinking about how I would characterize it to my wife when I got home. At first, I thought it was the best animated film I'd seen since Tangled (and with the Owls of Ga'Hoole and Delgo as the only competition, it certainly is), and had these wild thoughts about how it could be the best movie I will see all year in 2011, even though that's ridiculous. As it went along I started to downgrade it, and eventually I felt comfortable with the phrase "quite good."

And then it occurred to me that we have several familiar rating scales when it comes to movies. The most common is probably stars, either one to four or one to five. Slightly less common is letter grades, which work well when you want a quick summation ("I'd give it a B."). Then there's the good old "thumbs up, thumbs down," known for its lack of precision.

But what about a system that reflects the words people actually use when they talk about movies?

Forthwith:

What they say: "It was one of the best movies I've ever seen."
What it means: "It was one of the best movies I've ever seen."
What it could also mean: "It was not one of the best movies I've ever seen."
Star rating: 5 stars.
Letter grade: A+

What they say: "It was awesome."
What it means: "I am unreservedly in favor of this movie, and it may have a special place in my heart."
What it could also mean: "It was schlock, but it was really fun schlock."
Star rating: 4.5 stars
Letter grade: A

What they say: "It was great."
What it means: "It was extremely well made, but it's possible I don't have a specific passion for it."
What it could also mean: "It was awful." (Must be said sarcastically.)
Star rating: 4 stars
Letter grade: A-

What they say: "It was really good."
What it means: "It has some flaws, but not that many."
What it could also mean: "It was not really good, but you the person I'm talking to had some role in making it, and I want you to think I really liked it." (Must be said with a rise in inflection at the end of the sentence.)
Star rating: 3.5 stars
Letter grade: A-/B+

What they say: "It was quite good."
What it means: "It's slightly less than really good, but better than good."
What it could also mean: "It was excellent." (Must be said by a British person.)
Star rating: 3.5/3 stars
Letter grade: B+

What they say: "It was pretty good."
What it means: "It was only okay, but I don't have the heart to say that." (Emphasis on the word "pretty.")
What it could also mean: "It was really good." (Emphasis on the word "good.")
Star rating: 3 stars
Letter grade: B/B-

What they say: "It was good."
What it means: "It was happy with it." (Tone dropping from high to low on "good.")
What it could also mean: "It was excellent." (Tone solid on "good.")
Star rating: 3 stars
Letter grade: B+/B/B-

What they say: "It was okay."
What it means: "You won't wish you hadn't gone."
What it could also mean: "You might wish you hadn't gone."
Star rating: 2.5 stars
Letter grade: C+/C

What they say: "It was not that good."
What it means: "It disappointed me in a specific way that I can and probably will tell you about."
What it could also mean: "It's good, but not as good as most people say." (Emphasis on the word "that.")
Star rating: 2.5/2 stars
Letter grade: C

What they say: "It was pretty bad."
What it means: "I'm shocked at how much worse it was than I expected it to be."
What it could also mean: "It was offensive to some minority, and also not very good."
Star rating: 1.5 stars
Letter grade: C-/D+

What they say: "It was really bad."
What it means: "I did not like this movie much."
What it could also mean: No secondary meaning.
Star rating: 1.5/1 stars
Letter grade: D/D-

What they say: "It sucked."
What it means: "It was made terribly and fell way short of my expectations."
What it could also mean: "And it insulted my family."
Star rating: .5 stars
Letter grade: F

What they say: "It was one of the worst movies I've ever seen."
What it means: "It boggles my mind that someone approved this movie, and no one involved with it will ever work in Hollywood again."
What it could also mean: "It's awesomely bad. Everyone needs to see it to appreciate the art form it makes of badness."
Star rating: 0/3 stars
Letter grade: F- or ironic C+

There, that should pretty much cover it.

So, B+ and 3.5 stars for Rango. It's slightly less than really good, but better than good.

Movie moments - That delicate tap

Effective immediately, from time to time I will write posts discussing moments in movies that stick with me. I have no idea how often I'll do it or what moments I'll choose to discuss, but the purpose of this is not to tackle the really famous details from classic movies -- it's to examine small, quiet moments that may not immediately leap out at you.

What inspired this idea was a moment in Antwone Fisher, which I saw on Tuesday.

I was supposed to see Antwone Fisher for the first time several years ago -- I don't remember the circumstances, but I do remember that the copy of the movie I had was damaged, so I couldn't watch it. I didn't make a second attempt until Tuesday, when I watched the copy I'd won in a poker game last fall -- details discussed here.

I must say, my expectations for Antwone Fisher were not particularly high. Even though I'd recently seen and very much liked Denzel Washington's sophomore directing effort, The Great Debaters, that didn't significantly improve my perspective on the potential for his directorial debut. In fact, if I didn't inadvertently own a copy, I might not have ever watched it. I imagined it to be saccharine, and I felt that the mentor-mentee relationship at the center of the film would be trite.

Well, I was wrong. I really enjoyed it. Washington is a certifiable talent behind the camera, as he has now made two above average films. No, not everything about it is what you would call original. But overall I found it to be original in important ways, and more than anything, I was impressed by the performance that Washington coaxed out of Derek Luke in the title role. The character is believably complex -- because he grew up an orphan, among caregivers who would beat him, and was molested as a child (more on that later), he has a lot of anger. But he's also capable of exquisite sensitivity, and that's what I want to discuss today.

Near the end of the film, when he is driven to seek out his mother (who effectively abandoned him when she failed to claim him after being freed from the prison where he was born), Antwone and his girlfriend (played by the luminous Joy Bryant) spend hours in a Cleveland hotel room, calling all the Elkins in the phone book. He's just learned that Elkins was the surname of his father, who died before he was born. Late at night, when his girlfriend is asleep on the other bed, Antwone finally connects to the right Elkins -- in fact, it's so late that he awakens the person that turns out to be his aunt.

After a short conversation and setting a date to meet the next day, Antwone moves over to the other bed to give his girlfriend the good news. He doesn't really want to disturb her sleep, but the news is too important not to share. So he decides to lightly tap her on her arm with his finger.

Tap-tap-tap. No effect. Tap-tap-tap. No effect. Tap-tap-tap. This time, her eyes open. "I found my family," he tells her in a soft voice, with all the hopeful innocence of a child. Her face becomes aglow, and she wraps him up in a warm embrace.

For some reason, I just love this moment. More than any "big scene" could ever accomplish, this light tapping on his girlfriend's arm speaks volumes about the way Antwone has matured from a derelict naval officer, ready to fight at any moment as the result of any provocation, to a sensitive man who just wants to find beauty in the world, to replace the ugliness he has known. It put a big smile on my face.

Whether this is an accurate representation of the real Antwone Fisher, or a fanciful embellishment by the man himself (Fisher wrote the script to his own life story), doesn't really matter. What matters is the arc that Luke and Washington have created for this particular character. And it's immensely satisfying. It's all the more so the next day, when Fisher's newly discovered relatives welcome him with open arms and a giant feast. (Everyone but his actual mother, who is distant and paralyzed by regret, but the others more than make up for it.)

I said I would get back to the sexual molestation experienced by Fisher as a child ... and so I will now, with some hesitation. When I first saw the movie, I was thinking of making this the topic of a whole post before I decided it was too controversial.

Over the course of the narrative it's revealed that Antwone, now age 25, is a virgin. The reasons for his virginity come out in the course of his sessions with Washington's character, a naval psychiatrist. It turns out Antwone, as a six-year-old, was sexually molested by an older girl (late teens? early 20s?) also living in his foster home. This led directly to him never having seen another woman naked to that day.

At the time I was struck by our societal double standard regarding molestation of children, and how it contributes to things like the effectiveness of a dramatic plot point in a movie. Any time a man has relations with a child, be it boy or girl, it is quite obviously an abhorrent transgression, and we are not surprised in the least to learn that the child was traumatized by this incident. However, when it's a woman doing the molesting, it doesn't seem to have quite the same impact on us, does it? I tend to think about the cases we've heard where a teacher slept with a student. If it's a male teacher sleeping with a female (or male) student, we tend to think that the student was taken advantage of, even if he/she viewed it as consensual. But when a female teacher sleeps with a male student, well, we think of it as the male student's wildest fantasies come true, don't we?

Needless to say, this is a faulty analogy because no six-year-old child can be said to consent to any kind of sexual activity -- unless it is kissing another six-year-old on the playground. But I must admit that this double standard is so strong, it affected my ability to view Antwone's sexual abuse as quite the tragedy the movie makes it out to be.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware that my perspective is unjust. I'm just trying to elucidate the strength of this double standard. We tend to think of males -- even if they're boys -- as so eager to have (heterosexual) sex, that even being six years old would make it some kind of "fantasy come true."

Like I said, controversial. But I thought it was worth discussing. I don't doubt that the real Fisher was traumatized by this "relationship," especially since it seemed to involve some kind of dominance (when doesn't sexual molestation involve dominance?) and possibly violence as well (when isn't sexual molestation violent, at least emotionally if not physically?).

Don't judge me too much for being honest. I just like to keeps it real, and discuss what comes into my head, as it comes into my head. After all, in their best form, shouldn't movies stimulate ideas in us, make us want to discuss their contents?

That movie where Matt Damon wears a silly hat

You probably know that The Adjustment Bureau is finally coming out today, after having its release date pushed back (I believe) more than once.

Which means that I have had quite a long time to think of it as "That movie where Matt Damon wears a silly hat."

To be fair, none of the people in this movie look particularly good in this fedora, be it Terence Stamp, John Slattery or Damon himself. But Damon himself looks particularly silly in it, if you ask me.

My admittedly simplistic characterization of the film is helped by the fact that I haven't read too much else about it, which means I don't know what it's really about. I will say that some of the images from the trailers remind me of an episode of Fringe. And even though I watch Fringe, I'm not necessarily sure this is a good thing. I'm always between three and five episodes behind on Fringe, and even though the world it explores is quite expansive (it literally deals with different dimensions), there's something sort of "small screen" about the whole thing. Which is probably why I'm always behind, rather than voraciously consuming every episode as it comes out.

But The Adjustment Bureau is certainly a contender for me this weekend. I plan to go to the theater for the first time since mid-January, which seems like eons ago now. It's so long ago, in fact, that since the last movie I saw in the theater (Blue Valentine), I've lost my wallet (at Blue Valentine), used a replacement wallet for over two weeks, found my wallet again (the janitorial staff finally turned it in to the lost and found at the theater), and been carrying around my old wallet for a good three weeks now. So yeah, I guess it's time to get back to the movies.

But I need your help. What would you see this weekend, out of the following list of contenders?

The Adjustment Bureau
Rango
Gnomeo & Juliet
Cedar Rapids
Hall Pass
Take Me Home Tonight

The one thing I do know is that there will be a lot more choices from here on out. After what I considered to be a sub-par February for new releases, March is doing its best to redeem things. Next week brings Battle: Los Angeles, Jane Eyre and Red Riding Hood, all three of which I am probably interested in seeing in the theater.

Getting acquainted with ... James Cagney

This is the first in a monthly series called Getting Acquainted, in which I watch three movies featuring a cinematic personality -- actor, director, etc. -- I need to get to know better.

If you didn't read my introductory Getting Acquainted piece about a month ago -- and conveniently ignored the title of today's post -- you might think I had chosen to get acquainted with director Michael Curtiz in February. After all, he directs the first two movies I'm going to discuss. And until this month, I'd always thought of him as "that guy who directed Casablanca and nothing else I've ever heard of." Seems the Getting Acquainted series came along just in time to correct some long-standing misconceptions of mine.

But no, both of those movies, and the third, feature James Cagney, a guy I don't know all that much about. In fact, I'd never seen a single film in which he was the star before about a month ago.

My initial impression of Cagney was as a short, rambunctious character with a chip on his shoulder. From the clips I'd seen of him, I got the impression he was always angry, and liked to shout a lot. I thought he was the little pipsqueak who might raises his dukes and say "Put 'em up! Put 'em up!" Then would pop you one, right in the kisser.

Well, he plays a notorious gangster in two of the movies, so maybe I was half right.

Note: From here on out I will speak casually about plot details, without giving spoiler warnings.

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938, Michael Curtiz). Watched: Tuesday, February 1st

My first Cagney movie was an excellent introduction to the man. I must admit it was the intriguing title that put it on my radar, but the movie itself was far more intriguing than I would have guessed for the year 1938 -- what I mistakenly think of as "a simpler time."

What first caught my attention was the way Curtiz moved his camera through the lower-class neighborhoods populated by Cagney's Rocky Sullivan and the teenagers played by the Dead End Kids, a troupe of young actors who continued to work together in various incarnations for something like 25 years (and have an hilarious camaraderie). It's not like Orson Welles invented camera movements in film with Citizen Kane a couple years later, but some of the movements by Curtiz' camera are more sophisticated than I expected them to be, given what I know about the development of the technology at the time. The way he takes in an expertly dressed downtrodden neighborhood was simply breathtaking.

The story itself concerns Rocky's attempts to redeem himself (sort of) after a life in crime. We understand he's been put away a couple times for what started out as petty thievery, and graduated to more serious behavior. Yet this is not the hair-trigger Cagney I was expecting. Cagney's Sullivan is tough and takes no guff, to be sure, but he's also pretty suave and has a genuinely good heart. It's poignant that the apparent reason Rocky entered this life of crime was that he didn't run as fast as his cohort after their first petty theft, meaning he was the one the police caught up to. Meanwhile, his cohort steered clear of this life by becoming a reverend (Pat O'Brien). Could there have been the same positive outcome for Rocky? His charitable behavior (such as donating $10,000 to the reverend's youth facility) suggests that there could have been, but we'll never know.

Without going into all the details, suffice it to say that there's also a love interest (played by Ann Sheridan) and a nemesis (played wonderfully against type by Humphrey Bogart) for Rocky, and his relationships with both are deliciously complicated. As Rocky tries to pursue both sides of his personality -- the one that sort of wants to go straight, and the one that sort of wants to line his pockets with ill-gotten gains -- a tight narrative unfolds over a crisp 97 minutes.

But it was at the very end that I was truly blown away by Angels With Dirty Faces. When Rocky's darker half takes over, through a series of good intentions gone bad, he is eventually captured after committing a handful of killings, some of them innocents caught in the crossfire. He's not getting out of this one, and is sentenced to death row. Less than an hour before he's scheduled to die, Reverend Jerry asks Rocky to make the ultimate sacrifice, so that his death won't contribute to his legendary status among the wayward teens (the Dead End Kids) who worship him. Instead of going to the electric chair proud and defiant, as Rocky intends to do, Jerry asks him to show panic and fear in his last moments on this earth -- emotions that will show these teenagers that a life of crime is not a glamorous form of rebellion. He asks Rocky to give himself the legacy of a coward, to tarnish the only part of him that will live beyond his death. It's an amazing sacrifice, and I've never see anything quite like it in the movies.

Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942, Michael Curtiz). Watched: Tuesday, February 15th

Well, what a change from Angels With Dirty Faces. Yankee Doodle Dandy is a musical, the story of the life of George M. Cohan, who composed such classic songs as "Over There," "Give My Regards to Broadway," "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Yankee Doodle Boy." Given that impressive resume, I had a hard time believing I'd never heard of him.

If Angels With Dirty Faces was tight and crisp, then Yankee Doodle Dandy is long and flabby. Clocking in at 126 minutes, the film contains countless musical numbers as it goes through the stages of Cohan's life, frequently resembling a Busby Berkeley musical in terms of its aesthetic and sense of showmanship. This isn't to say that the movie isn't rousing at times -- those songs make sure of that. However, it is to say that it took me about three sittings to finish it, though being very busy certainly contributed to my delay.

What I took most from Yankee Doodle Dandy is how it demonstrated, in no uncertain terms, Cagney's range as a performer. He's the farthest thing imaginable from Rocky Sullivan in this movie, and even farther removed from Cody Jarrett, the character he plays in our third film. Yet he isn't a bit less convincing. The charming side is the one that dominates here, though it should be said that Cohan was also known as a bit of a troublemaker early in his career -- a guy who was difficult to work with. Perhaps that's why Curtiz saw Cagney as the perfect choice for the role.

And speaking of that range, did you know this guy could sing and dance? I'm sure Cagney appeared in any number of musicals, but in the interest of judging him only in the context of these three movies, I'm not going to research his whole career for this piece. Let's just say the guy is a natural. A beautiful singing voice, to be sure, and an innate sense of how to move on the stage. But what I found exquisitely delightful was his dancing, in which his legs seemed to have a life of their own, disconnected from his upper torso. His legs kicked and skipped him along the stage in a manner I can't properly describe. As I said, delightful.

And gosh darn it if I wasn't humming/singing "Yankee Doodle Boy" for a period of about a week after the movie. One thing I noticed that was funny: As I learned that song growing up, I thought the lyrics were "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy, Yankee Doodle doo dah day." It's actually "Yankee Doodle do or die." That makes more sense -- "doo dah day" doesn't mean anything. Now I'm wondering if it was just me that mislearned it, or if our music teachers taught it to us in a different way because they thought we were too young to be making references to death in the songs we were singing.

A final interesting thing about Yankee Doodle Dandy -- it's a great example of the filmmaking of its time because it essentially functions as a propaganda film to support World War II. Today, something like that would sound ridiculous at best, pernicious at worst. But patriotism, especially in a war like World War II, was never stigmatized then as it might be today. The point about Cohan, and the title song, is that he is a lover of the United States of America through and through. Back then, nobody questioned whether that was a good thing or not.

White Heat (1949, Raoul Walsh). Watched: Saturday, February 26th

And after a soft middle, we end strong with James Cagney. As Cody Jarrett, he's back in the role of a criminal -- but this time he's an unrepentant criminal, an anti-hero if ever there was one. And this, my friends, looks good on him as well.

As the film opens, Jarrett and his associates are robbing a train. We learn how merciless Jarrett is when he kills several train employees, just because one of his associates accidentally spoke Jarrett's name in their presence. Back at the hideout, he orders one of his associates to kill another, just because the second was burned by an expulsion of steam on the train, and they can't afford to take him to a doctor. This is no Rocky Sullivan -- he doesn't want to do good for anyone but himself, and possibly his mother (Margaret Wycherly). Oh yeah, did I mention that Cody is obsessed with his mother, who is part of their criminal operation? Not only that, but Cody suffers from overwhelming migraines, and might just be crazy. As a result of all this, the only person he trusts is his mum, casting a suspicious glance at everyone else -- even and perhaps especially his wife (Virginia Mayo), to whom he is inordinately cruel. The narrative then progresses into prison, where Cody smartly opts to serve a short sentence for a job that he supposedly committed at the same time as the train job -- hence giving him an alibi for the worse crime. He's not only ruthless, and crazy, but also smart, as we will see repeatedly throughout.

As I was watching White Heat, I kept thinking of other films it reminded me of -- films that didn't come out until decades later, and may never have come out at all if it weren't for having their way paved by Raoul Walsh's film. For one, the film involves the deep undercover work of a federal agent (Edmond O'Brien), who goes into prison to gain Cody's trust in an attempt to locate where the booty from the train job is hidden. I was instantly reminded of Donnie Brasco, and the way an infiltrating lawman is forever on the verge of discovery in a precarious situation like this. Turns out, White Heat is more tense and examines this in smarter ways, 50 years earlier. Then there's the mother character, who reminds me of countless nefarious mother figures in films, most recently Jacki Weaver's character in Animal Kingdom. One of my only complaints about the movie is that when Cody's rival kills his mother, the whole thing occurs off-screen, almost as an afterthought. That could have been handled better.

And let's look at Cody Jarrett himself. In what I assume must be a trailblazing performance, Cagney plays him as a true psycho -- a genuine anti-hero whose every action is despicable. He's twitchy, he's deranged, he's focused on his own mother to an alarming degree. Yet because of Cagney's powerful magnetism, we actually like the guy, in spite of all the things he does. I'm borrowing from another writer (I can't remember who, but someone I read in the last few days) when I make this observation, but Cody Jarrett paved the way for the darker villainous performances we would come to see in the 1960 and 1970s. And in White Heat, the clock had not yet struck 1950.

To top off an amazing viewing experience, the movie climaxes with a famous line I didn't realize was from White Heat: "Look, ma! Top of the world!" Followed by Jarrett being consumed in an explosion that he himself triggered. What a way to go out for a truly indelible character.

Good start to Getting Acquainted, Jimmy Cagney. I'm sorry I didn't know you before now. But you can bet I'll check in with you again in the future. Soon.

And now, on to March, when I'll be getting acquainted with ...

Ha! I'm not telling. If you would like to follow my Most Recently Seen section and take a guess, I may -- not holding myself to it -- host a little contest right before the end of the month, to see if you've divined my focus for the March edition of Getting Acquainted.

However, that could require a lot of work on your end, so don't worry about it. I already make you read a lot every day -- to keep track of what I watch, as I watch it, is for obsessives only.

If you are one of those obsessive, well, just try not to go the route of Cody Jarrett. Even though you get to have a killer sound bite, it's quite painful.

A classic movie night with a (new) classic movie

You know you really love a movie when you spend all week looking forward to watching it -- for the fourth time.

Saturday night was my fourth viewing of Children of Men, but my first in about three years. So I'd had plenty of time to work up an appetite.

My fourth viewing probably would have come sooner, except that my own DVD copy was loaned to a friend for something like a year-and-a-half (and he never actually watched it). However, having my own copy didn't enter into this viewing -- just as it didn't enter into my third viewing, when my wife and I saw the movie starting on cable, and just watched it straight through, even though we had a DVD copy sitting on the shelf nearby. Not getting great use out of that DVD purchase, I guess, but there's a value in just owning something as part of your collection, where you could watch it ... right?

There were two reasons I was looking forward so much to this fourth viewing:

1) I would be seeing it on BluRay for the first time;

2) I would be seeing it on a TV that's much, much bigger than mine.

A friend of mine had been talking about getting people together for a viewing of Children of Men, and chose this past Saturday, when his wife was out of town, as the perfect time. Not only would there be the superior image quality on the largest screen I'd seen it on since the theater, but the third person watching the movie with us hadn't seen it before. I don't know about you, but it gives me a certain giddy pleasure to sit next to someone as they discover an awesome movie. (Just watch that you don't overhype it; more on that in a minute.)

Even if the movie in question hadn't been Children of Men, I would have still been looking forward to Saturday night, because it served as an instance of a type of social gathering that's become increasingly rare for me in recent years: "movie night."

Back in the day, it used to be one of my favorite activities to go to the video store with a couple friends and pick out something to watch that night. We were seeing each other regularly enough, so we didn't consider it a sacrifice to spend two hours of our available face time watching a movie together. Not "social" in the strictest sense of that word, but a shared experience that is enhanced by the very act of sharing it.

As our lives got busier, though, it seemed like we were "wasting" our time together if we spent the time pointed forward at the boob tube. Oh, the TV was still an integral part of our socializing, but the content shifted. Now, people wanted something mindless they could talk over -- a reality TV show, Sportcenter, or a movie we'd all already seen. The point was to spend most of the time interfacing with each other, not with a moving image.

And while it's hard to criticize that impulse -- I mean, we already spend too much time using devices that deteriorate our ability to connect one-on-one with other humans -- I do miss the experience of renting and watching a movie with friends. So I jump at the opportunities when they come up.

And it being Children of Men ... well, that just made it all the better.

As I was watching this movie I love and recommend to so many people, it struck me how you can continue discovering things -- pretty big things, in fact -- about a movie, even if you've already seen it three times. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.) Here are a couple of those things:

1) In addition to the two famous steadicam long takes from the film -- the amazing sequence when the car is attacked by the Fishes, and the ridiculously difficult battlefield sequence at the end -- there were two other long takes that impressed me greatly. One is when Theo (Clive Owen) and the two women are trying to escape the Fishes hideout, and Theo crawls alongside of several cars, disabling the engine of one of them, before selecting one to escape in. The shot lasts for several minutes and is more complex than it initially seems. The second is when Kee (Claire Hope-Ashitey) is about to give birth. From the time they enter the room in Bexhill until the baby is born, there are no cuts. And how the hell did they execute such a realistic baby birth? Is that an animatronic baby? Or digital? I don't know, and I almost don't want to know. (As for the two more famous shots -- we discussed both in detail for about 20 minutes afterward.)

2) Even though it's a great running joke, I had totally forgotten the detail that Theo spends the second half of the movie without proper footwear. When he finds out that the Fishes plan to kill him and take Kee for their own purposes, he executes an impromptu escape -- even though he's in his stocking feet. Even when the motley group of refugees arrives at the house of Theo's friend Jasper (Michael Caine), he can find no better fit than a pair of those cheap flip-flops. Much later on in Bexhill, he finally gets a pair of sneakers, but before then he's already had to execute several great escapes in significantly inferior footwear. In fact, I can't be 100% sure he actually gets to wear the sneakers -- I'll save that for the fifth viewing.

3) I did not realize until this viewing that Theo's cousin (Danny Huston) works at a place called The Ark of Art, which is trying to collect the great artwork that still exists before the world destroys it. For some reason, I was always under the impression that his cousin was just super rich, which is why he's got the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals recreated outside of his dining room window.

4) Here's a personal one. A few weeks back, Don Handsome made the discovery that Caine's character is named Jasper -- which is the name of my son. But when I was watching on Saturday, I realized that Clive Owen's character is named Theo -- which was also a strong contender for our son's name. When I shared this with my wife, she wondered if this had been in our subconscious somewhere. A nice connection to have to a movie we love so much.

The downside of re-watching a movie you love, of course, is that there's a chance you will be more critical of it than you had been previously. And there were actually two small things that bothered me upon this viewing of Children of Men:

1) I already had one concrete complaint about the dialogue, which I thought was limited to just one scene. Early on, when Jasper and Theo are driving alongside a train full of refugees, Jasper delivers a line that amounts to an extremely on-the-nose bit of exposition about the refugees and the government's position toward them. I've noticed this line on every viewing, and I noticed it again this time. What I hadn't noticed previously was how heavy-handed I found the dialogue between Theo and Julian (Julianne Moore) when they're on the top level of the double-decker bus, arguing about their child who died years earlier. I found this exchange to be downright distracting.

2) My friend, who was a newcomer to the movie, pointed out a possible problem to which I still don't have a satisfactory response. Early on, when Theo is riding alone on the train (it's the same time you see that montage on the train's TV of all the other cities in the world falling into chaos), the train is besieged by a bunch of people throwing rocks and clumps of dirt. We couldn't say for sure because they were hard to see, but these people looked an awful lot like kids. Which is problematic, because we just started the movie learning that the world's youngest person -- 18-year-old "Baby Diego" -- had just been killed. (And what a great opening, by the way.) Because it was so hard to tell, I will forgive the movie this, but yeah, it seemed like some of those rock-throwers could have been under 16.

And so what did my friend think of his first viewing? He was suitably impressed by the film's amazing technical achievements, but overall he found it a bit too depressing. And, truth be told, he thought it had been over-hyped. That's the danger we film fans always confront -- you want to emphasize to a person that they need to see a certain movie, else you might not make it seem sufficiently urgent for them to actually prioritize a viewing. However, if you go overboard and tell them that it's the best movie they've ever seen, they almost certainly will not agree -- their expectations are so high, there's nowhere to go but down. Oh well. If he wants to have only a middling level of appreciation for Children of Men, it's his loss.

As for me ... well, I'm still in love. And the BluRay looked great. I remember being absolutely enthralled by the depth of field in this one particular shot, during the first visit to Jasper's house, when Theo has his stocking feet (remember those stocking feet for later on) kicked up on Jasper's coffee table. The image was so crisp that those feet seemed to be sticking right out of the TV into my friend's living room.

As a social gathering, it worked too. We were a small enough group that people weren't inclined to talk during the movie, though we did add a comment or two when the pacing seemed to allow a brief interjection (mostly to point out how amazing a particular shot had just been). We caught up for about 45 minutes before we started, and we engaged in another 45 minutes of post-mortem afterward.

Let's get another movie night on the schedule soon.

My favorite Oscar of the night

Early on in last night's show, when we paused to prepare a cocktail, put an appetizer in the oven or put our son to sleep, my wife told me that she didn't feel like she had a horse in the race this year.

"I mean, there were a lot of really good movies this year," she clarified. "But there's no one that I'm really pulling for, like when Bill Murray was up for Lost in Translation."

I nodded my head at that one -- Murray's loss to Sean Penn that year is one of those things that still stings me when I think about famous Oscar misses. The rest of my response was kind of a non-commital affirmation, the kind you give you when you generally agree, but don't have anything more to add, or are otherwise distracted and can't be bothered to contribute a response.

But a few minutes later, thinking on it, I realized I myself had a horse in the race this year -- a horse I may have been pulling for more than any horse that's ever run in the Oscars.

When the Best Original Score Oscar came up to bat, I felt myself get nervous and jittery. Trent Reznor, the erstwhile Nine Inch Nails frontman, was nominated alongside collaborator Atticus Ross for the unforgettable score for The Social Network. I felt reasonably confident he would win, but as I heard snippets of the scores of films like The King's Speech and Inception -- composed by formidable talents like Alexandre Desplat and Hans Zimmer -- I got nervous. Since the conventional wisdom was that The Social Network had "peaked too early," I was told to fear its prospects in any and all categories -- especially those categories where frontrunner The King's Speech was also nominated.

All it took was the "Tr" sound to come out of Nicole Kidman's mouth, and I let out a little cheer for my boy Trent.

At this point I should probably give you a little background.

Two thousand eleven marks the 20th anniversary of my awareness of Nine Inch Nails -- and about the 19th anniversary of when I started calling them my favorite band. I heard NIN's seminal album Pretty Hate Machine in the fall of 1991, when I was a freshman in college. I bought the CD that Christmas, and as they say, the rest is history. I have been a die-hard fan of the band through all its ups and downs, its interminable periods of inactivity (it's taken as long as five-and-a-half years for Trent to release a new Nine Inch Nails album -- not once, but twice), its periods in and out of rehab for Mr. Reznor (which probably coincided with some of those periods of inactivity). Throughout all that, never once has any other musical act chipped away at the title of my favorite. For musical genius that seems to approach Rain Man status in terms of sheer outside-the-box complexity, Trent Reznor has been my musical hero for nearly two decades. I've seen him perform live five times, and I've purchased pretty much everything he's ever been involved with, even soundtracks for movies I have still never seen (David Lynch's Lost Highway).

So when Nicole Kidman said his name last night, and those six signature notes of "Hand Covers Bruise" (the Social Network "theme song") played as he got out of his seat, I was as thrilled as a proud papa. No longer the angry depressive and nihilist who burst onto the scene in 1989, Reznor was a dapper 45-year-old with facial scruff and a handsome tuxedo, proud but modest, embracing the ceremony without irony. To paraphrase Vince Vaughn from Swingers, I thought, "My baby's all grownsed up!"

When he got up there, he gave an eloquent, composed and grateful speech, one that never for a moment seemed self-indulgent. Not only that, but he allowed equal time for Ross, a collaborator who -- let's be honest -- Reznor probably didn't need in order to give birth to the haunting brilliance of the Social Network score. I may never know the quantity of Ross' contributions to the project, but I'll always know that Reznor gave him equal credit for their masterpiece.

And if you haven't listened to the Social Network score in its entirety, you should go do that. Yeah, it probably speaks a little more to a Nine Inch Nails fan like me than it would to a regular person, but not a lot more. The compositions are both beautiful and catchy, rarely containing any of the fury of Nine Inch Nails, but displaying all the craftsmanship and musical experimentation in the best Nine Inch Nails work. And the thing I was most amazed about, upon first listen, is that I didn't miss the lyrics. As a good preview for his work on Social Network, Reznor made a massive four-disc Nine Inch Nails album called Ghosts a couple years back, which is entirely instrumental. I think the music is really good, but I've only listened to the whole thing all the way through once. I'm sure that has something to do with the imposing length of the album (over 40 tracks), but it's also that without lyrics, you can't really "attach" to the specific songs. I thought I needed those lyrics to keep me involved -- until I heard The Social Network.

In addition to his own original creations, I also love that he reimagined Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" for the Winklevoss crew sequence -- which was also used in the show last night.

As much as I am happy for Trent Reznor the artist, I'm happy for Trent Reznor the person. Sure, being an emotional mess contributed to some of his most brilliant work. But even if it's taken some of the "teeth" out of his music (NIN had an album called With Teeth), I'm really glad Trent has found happiness in his life. In 2009 he married former West Indian Girl singer Mariqueen Maandig, who was with him at the Kodak Theater last night, and they are now collaborating on a musical project called How to Destroy Angels, whose first EP is quite interesting (especially the song "A Drowning," which gives me chills). The future seems bright for a happy Trent -- in an extremely intelligent podcast interview about this soundtrack last year, he told us to expect new Nine Inch Nails material and new How to Destroy Angels material in 2011. Not only that, but I just read something I should have known already -- he'll also do the score for Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, due out later this year. Could Reznor be a perennial Oscar contender, like Zimmer and Desplat? Could he one day become the Randy Newman of nominees, without all the sarcasm and mean-spiritedness in his acceptance speech?

Who knows. For now, I just want to bask in having seen my favorite musician honored at my favorite awards show, by the people who make my favorite passion.

I wanted to hear "Hand Covers Bruise" all night last night, most notably when best picture was announced. But it turned out that I heard it at the most important time, for me personally, to hear it, and that is more than enough.

A couple other isolated thoughts on last night's show, which turned out somewhat decent after a disastrous start. If you've read these observations elsewhere, you can rest assured that I haven't -- I didn't read anything else about the Oscars before posting this:

1) The disastrous start wasn't right at the start. Right at the start was great, with the opening pre-recorded bit of hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway going into Alec Baldwin's dream. Spot on stuff. And it was a delight to see the ever-wonderful Baldwin.

2) The disasters started about the time Melissa Leo won her Oscar. That acceptance speech took years off my life. It was an absolute train wreck. What made it so terrible is that it was already going so terribly before Leo dropped her now-famous f-bomb. That section of the show felt like it took a half-hour, in part because the pacing ground to a halt once Kirk Douglas took the stage -- it was a nice idea and I was really charmed by what he was able to accomplish, but I must admit it made me impatient (which was sort of the point, as he did that bit where he made the nominees wait in agony for the winning name). So then when Leo began her choppy acceptance speech which committed just about every sin a speech can commit, it felt like the show couldn't regain its pacing for the next half-hour. Other seeming casualties of the temporary bad vibe was the awkward banter between Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, which just did not hit.

3) And speaking of Timberlake, his joke about being Banksy -- which I actually thought would get more laughs -- was the only Banksy appearance of the evening, that I'm aware of. A little disappointing. But perhaps I should read one of those articles I haven't read yet, which would tell me where else he may have made his presence known.

4) Is it just me, or did Hathaway seem to be doing a lot more actual hosting than Franco? It was like she was taking the hosting duties seriously, and he was standing there with an awkward grin on his face, like he was playing his stoner character in Pineapple Express. Even putting on the Marilyn Monroe dress did not really "work." Franco didn't embarrass himself or anything, he was just kind of ... "absent." At least Hathaway picked up the slack, though her song about Hugh Jackman was the most obvious thing that could have been lifted out of the show -- it was done well, but it was lacking in context and seemed pretty insiderish.

5) Give it up for the two youngest nominees, Hailee Steinfeld and Jennifer Lawrence, who were both ten times more adorable than I thought they would be from their films.

6) As a guy who frequently has bushy hair myself, I loved that "I should have gotten a haircut" guy.

7) Why haven't we heard more about Florence from Florence and the Machine before now? What a voice. Gwyneth Paltrow, on the other hand, looked constipated. I think the Tangled song should have won, and not just because I love Tangled so much. Zachary Levi and Mandy Moore reminded me that that song truly is special -- I would say easily the most strictly memorable of the four that were nominated. (Though I might have liked to see "Mother Knows Best," from the same movie, nominated as well.)

8) Christian Bale's acceptance speech was one of the highlights of the night for me. The tempestuous personality was all charm last night, and I loved his decision to thank people by first name only -- it was intimate and it felt special.

9) The auto-tune bit was one of my other highlights. It was such a good bit that I wanted to see it go on for five minutes longer. I love anything auto-tuned -- I think it's one of the great ways to use modern technology for high comedy.

10) I still love Billy Crystal. And the Bob Hope bit worked pretty well. How did they get "Bob Hope" to "announce" the next presenters?

11) Interesting choice to suppress the applause during the "In Memoriam" section. Without reading more about it, I don't know if that was done by shutting off the microphones in the audience during that section, or a sign that told people not to applaud. I agree that it must seem very sad for relatives/friends of the less famous dead people when no one applauds their person.

12) Sandra Bullock nailed it. Jeff Bridges was good, but Bullock nailed it. Class and humor, in one complete package. And then Colin Firth's acceptance speech was just what we've come to expect from him. Shouldn't he have been an Oscar winner already? Sure seems like it.

13) I loved the decision to do away with the periodic clips from the best picture nominees that run throughout the night. They did a good enough job incorporating that stuff into other pieces throughout the night, most notably what was probably the best highlight of the evening: The montage before best picture was announced, which was cut to Firth's speech in The King's Speech. That was expertly done and I had chills the whole time watching it. Even the words matched up perfectly to the images, such as when Firth says "enemies" and former best friends Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg from The Social Network give each other a steely look. Well played.

14) I loved Steven Spielberg's decision to put into context what it means to lose best picture -- that you now have something in common with Citizen Kane and Raging Bull. Great touch.

15) At first I was not sure about finishing the show with the elementary school kids singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," but I ultimately decided that it was nice not to have the hosts give just a few awkward words at the end before the credits roll. It was an attempt to have what my wife and I call a "Saturday Night Live clap clap" moment at the end -- you know, like at the very end of SNL, when everyone's out on stage and the music has this quality of reminiscing about the good times of the evening just passed. I'm not sure if it worked 100%, but it was better than the awkward alternative. (Also, loved that one kid who was totally over-emoting.)

I'm sure there's a lot more I could/should say, but I'm working without notes and going from memory only, so let's just cut it off here.

Besides, I have to go read all those Oscar stores I haven't read yet ...