Month-appropriate

We have oodles of ways of watching movies these days: the theater, renting from a video store, borrowing from the library, watching OnDemand ... the list goes on.

It seems that one not-very-good method -- for me, anyway -- is recording a movie on the DVR. It makes sure that I'll have it until I'm ready to watch, rather than running the risk of missing it OnDemand.

But it sure doesn't incentivize me to watch it very quickly. I recorded August Rush, a movie I'm reviewing, off of Cinemax way back on May 25th. I only just watched it last night.

Part of that delay certainly has to do with the fact that it's summer, and there isn't much other programming cramping the space on our DVR. Then there's also the fact that the DVR recording forces me to watch it on our living room TV, and my wife (rightly) had no interest in sitting through it with me.

But maybe I just wanted to wait until August, giving the title an extra appropriateness. I guess that means I'll have to wait another year to watch my DVR recording of Pride of the Yankees. After all, Lou Gehrig's famous "luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech came on July 4th. (Or it could just be that I can't summon the motivation to see a movie about my most hated team in sports).

A couple thoughts on August Rush, which was directed by Jim Sheridan's daughter, Kirsten:

1) One of the initial reasons I requested this movie was because I thought it had one of the weirdest casts I'd ever seen assembled. The five best-known actors in it are Freddie Highmore, Keri Russell, Robin Williams, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Terrence Howard. Ran-dom. I'm even having trouble deciding which two of those actors would be most likely to appear in a movie together.

2) I'm not quite sure if I understand why the basic structure of Oliver Twist continues to interest people so much. Highmore plays the Oliver character here, and Robin Williams is Fagan. Yawn.

3) Although I found the film mostly twee and precious, I did enjoy some of the sequences involving how young Evan perceives symphonies of music in everyday street sounds.

4) I noticed that whoever writes the informational blurbs for Time Warner Cable had the same internal fight about whether this movie was good or not that I discussed here. The first thing they show you after listing the two top-billed cast members is the star rating. August Rush received two -- out of four or five, I'm not sure. But then it was followed by this rather breathless synopsis: "Wonderfully rewarding urban fairy tale about a 12-year-old prodigy
(the marvelous Freddie Highmore) who heads to New York City to find and reunite with the musician parents who abandoned him as a baby." Call me crazy, but if you have only 33 words for the synopsis, and someone else says the movie sucks by way of giving it two stars, you should probably skip such rhapsodic sentiments as "wonderfully rewarding" and "marvelous" and just stick to summarizing the plot.

My site also gives it two stars. I'll probably give it a two-and-a-half star review.

Anyway.

Groan-inducing movie title of the day

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

An August to remember?

Used to be, August was about the second-worst month of the year for a movie to come out. Okay, maybe the third. January is certainly the worst, then let's call September the second worst. August was definitely #3.

Defies logic a little bit, doesn't it? After all, August is one of two core months we associate with summer, the other being July. June is pretty summery, but technically speaking, all but nine days of it are in the spring.

The summer movie season, on the other hand, has an entirely different definition. Summer movies start coming out in May -- some years, even in April. May and June are the primary months, and by July, it already feels like it's late in the season -- like there might be something wrong with the movie that prevented it from coming out earlier. By August, the movie has a definite taint to it, a definite whiff of a would-be blockbuster that they knew was no good. To save face, they still have to release it in summer, but the only chance for it to make any money is to go up against others like it that came up short. August is the month in which such classics as The Avengers (1998) and Dukes of Hazzard (2005) were released. Movies like that.

But two weeks after Dukes of Hazzard, things changed, thanks to a little movie called The 40 Year Old Virgin. (I feel like I'm writing about that movie a lot this week). Virgin was released on the 19th of August in 2005, and it made big bucks. Another Judd Apatow-produced movie, Superbad, pulled the same trick on August 17, 2007. Last year's Apatow entry was Pineapple Express, slightly earlier on August 6th, followed a week later by the better and funnier Tropic Thunder.

All that must have been preparing us for this August, when I feel like the month has truly rehabilitated its public image back to "desirable" status. Can you ever remember an August featuring so many movies you were excited about, or at least curious about? I can't. In fact, I'd argue that the movies coming out this month interest me more than in any month since May. It gets even better if you consider yesterday's release of Funny People to be the first pseudo-August release. (Though I'm starting to hear not such things about that movie, so maybe not).

In order of release date, here are the movies I'm interested in this month, and why:

Julie & Julia (August 7th). This may be a chick flick, but it stars two pretty delightful chicks -- national treasure Meryl Streep and spunky not-quite-newcomer Amy Adams. Both are a joy to watch, and I have a special affinity for celebrity impersonations, so I'm looking forward to what Streep does with Child. I may not catch it in the theater, but that's just because it will be a busy month.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (August 7th). I expect this to be craptastic -- this is one of those "old August" releases. However, I did play with G.I. Joe figures when I was a kid. In fact, I played with them tons more than Transformers, amassing four or five dozen of them, plus a fleet of tanks, all-terrain vehicles and aircraft. I'll see it just for my own personal nostalgia, and I must say, the trailers leave me interested enough.

District 9 (August 14th). This might be the movie I'm most excited about this month, even if some friends tried to make me wary of it when we were discussing it at a 4th of July BBQ. That's when they told me this was supposed to be the Halo movie, but it went belly-up, so they hurriedly turned it into District 9. I thought that meant they were using the old, already-shot Halo footage and turning it into something else, but reading some more on it, I'm not so sure -- if I interpreted producer Peter Jackson's words correctly, I think it's a different project altogether because the first failed. Well, we'll see. Barring negative word of mouth that's so loud that I can't possibly escape it, I'll be at this one opening weekend.

The Time Traveler's Wife (August 14th). Another chick flick here -- more counter-programming. But I have a personal stake in this one, as I read (and really liked) the novel, and have been waiting for this to come out for it seems like two years since I first heard it was nearly finished. I guess it wasn't nearly finished, because Gus Van Sant was attached to direct back then. (Robert Schwentke is now the director -- let's hope he does better here than he did in Flightplan). I guess the delay is not a good sign, but consider me still very curious anyway.

Paper Heart (August 14th). A pseudo-documentary about an actress in the Apatow troupe (Charyle Yi, who appeared in Knocked Up) searching for her definition of love, or something. Perhaps of more interest, Michael Cera is the co-star as her (real-life?) boyfriend, or something. Could be twee, but could also be a lot of fun.

It Might Get Loud (August 14th). A documentary featuring three guitar luminaries discussing their craft: The Edge, Jack White and Jimmy Page. It might get seen. Then again, it might not. Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim directs.

Inglourious Basterds (August 21st). This is the one most people are probably looking forward to -- Quentin Tarantino's first film since his half of Grindhouse (Death Proof). The timing of this one may indicate more than any of these other films that "August is back." Tarantino's movies usually come out in the fall. Then again, it could also indicate that Basterds is just not very good.

Taking Woodstock (August 28th). Ang Lee's film about Woodstock, featuring one of my favorite comedians, Demetri Martin, as the kid whose farmland is used for the festival as a way of saving his family from financial ruin. Lee is always interesting -- he's one of our most unpredictable directors in terms of his subject matter -- and I'm interested to see what Martin can do off the stand-up stage.

The Final Destination (August 28th). Okay, this is probably "old August" as well -- a high-concept horror with a high body count. But it is in 3-D. And I've seen all the other Final Destination movies. Why stop now?

So will this be an august August?

I guess we'll have to tune in to see.

Video store Darwinism

So if you were following my "Most Recently Seen" updates (to the right), you may have noticed that I finally broke down and saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen last Friday. Yep, that was my big punishment to Michael Bay for making another noisy piece of idiocy full of racially insensitive robots -- to wait exactly 30 days after its release before adding my $17 to the coffers.

Hey, my friend wanted to go. I was just trying to be social.

(And yes, I did feel terrible spending more money on this movie than I have on any previous movie. It appears they've hiked the IMAX prices again, and since I bought mine online, there was a $1 service fee as well).

As with the first one, I suspect I liked it more than most of my friends -- those who saw it, anyway, since most of them were unwilling. I guess there's something about the character design of the robots (when you can see them properly), and the large-scale havoc they create, that goes straight to my id. But I did like it less than the first one, and the end was so long and overblown that I was actually falling asleep. There, Michael Bay -- there's your ultimate indictment. I fell asleep during your grand finale.

Apparently, though, if you check my "Most Recently Seen" feature again, I must have liked it well enough. Well enough to go out and rent Transmorphers: Fall of Man, anyway.

(Pause for laughter.)

Yes, you read that right: Transmorphers: Fall of Man. It's in the video store now. Go take a look if you don't believe me.

I rented it because I thought it was finally time to write about a phenomenon that has both bugged me, and made me laugh my fool head off, for a couple years now. Namely, "quickie" straight-to-video knockoffs made in order to coincide with the theatrical release of legitimate big-screen blockbusters. These pretenders have been crassly produced with the sole purpose of trying to convince a flustered consumer walking the video aisles that they're renting the Real McCoy.

Hey, it's a dog-eat-dog world out there -- if you are parted with your money over one of these hoaxes, you clearly weren't fit enough to survive.

Me? I was parted with my money (or rather, a free online trade-in) for the purposes of science. Because I write a movie blog, I thought it was finally time to see one of these movies, even though I missed Transmorphers when it was released to coincide with Bay's first Transformers in 2007. I usually try to avoid seeing sequels before the original, but I made an exception in this case.

(Pause for laughter.)

I say that it was finally time to see one of these movies. Well, what exactly do I mean by "these movies?" (What do you mean "you people?")

How about this?

Or this?Or this one?


Or any of these?




(A couple notes on this last group. While Clawed is about the Sasquatch, the poster is so shamelessly modeled after Saw that it hardly matters if the subject matter is different. The Terminators actually appeared as a trailer on my Transmorphers DVD (along with the awesomely-titled Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus). And Pirates may be the most pernicious of the bunch, as it appeared not in some special section of the Blockbuster, but in the same new release area where Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest would have appeared. I'm sure some hopeless parents were confused into buying a softcore porn starring reformed hardcore porn stars, such as Janine).

They're all funny, these naked attempts to steal our money by insulting our intelligence. Then again, maybe we deserve it -- the only way these films would even be worth making is if people bought and rented them.

But the funniest has got to be Transmorphers: Fall of Man, as even the part after the colon is an attempt to fool us, with the words "Fall of Man" clearly echoing "Revenge of the Fallen." You see, it's all about making something click in our minds. We half-remember the title -- maybe this was it after all. And since the poster art is ten times fancier looking than anything in the movie -- especially since there's nary a skyscraper nor a tank in it -- a person can almost be excused for getting confused.

Almost.

And so it was that I decided I should actually view Transmorphers 2 before I wrote this post.

What did I learn?

1) It's not bad as you'd think it would be -- nor is it the least bit good.

2) Its only recognizeable star is Bruce Boxleitner. That's right, the erstwhile Scarecrow to Kate Jackson's Mrs. King.

3) It really has a lot more to do with the Terminator mythology, plot-wise, than the Transformers mythology. Yeah, the robots are disguised as everyday objects, such as cars and cell phones, initially, but once they "transmorph" a single time, they pretty much don't go back. Then they seek to bring about the end of the world -- or at least, the end of the small patch of California desert outside Bakersfield that's in the film's budget. I assume the original Transmorphers was a lot more Terminator-oriented, as this is a prequel (how sophisticated these knockoffs get) from before the machines took over. At the end, this one dude -- played by the perfectly named actor Shane Van Dyke -- becomes "leader of the resistance." His name is Con Jonner. (Okay, I made that last part up.)

4) If you are making what's known in the industry as a "mockbuster" -- I just now learned this term from wikipedia -- it doesn't actually matter if your movie is like The Terminator, or Transformers, or Driving Miss Daisy. All you're really trying to do is get people in the door. Once they've rented (or if they're really stupid, bought) the movie, you don't care if they're satisfied with their purchase or not. You're not looking for repeat customers. You're looking for a quick clutch at the money, then hopping a plane to somewhere far far away.

The article on wikipedia also reminded me of another title I'd tried to find, but struck out on: The DaVinci Treasure. Apparently, most of these monstrosities -- including a "competing" version of War of the Worlds released on video at the time of Steven Spielberg's, and this year's The Land That Time Forgot, starring C. Thomas Howell -- are the brainchildren of a "film studio" called The Asylum. Now I know.

Of course, when I told a couple people that I'd be watching Transmorphers, they wondered aloud whether it had a chance to be better than the newest Transformers. If I were a lot more mercenary or a lot less honest, maybe I'd tell you that it was. But no -- Transmorphers is pretty ridiculous, even if it wasn't as howlingly ridiculous as I hoped it would be.

Besides, when you're watching the howlingly ridiculous parts of Transformers, at least you feel some sense of the cleanliness and legitimacy that Hollywood has bestowed on it.

And, unlike those poor saps who walked away with Ratatoing, you know what you're getting yourself into.

The funniest person in Hollywood?

On the eve of the release of Funny People, I thought I'd ask a question that my more savvy readers will certainly know the answer to:

How many films do you think Judd Apatow has directed?

Ten? Fifteen?

How about three?

That's right, Funny People is only the third film directed by this comedy giant. For even casual fans, the other two should jump readily to mind: The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up.

Yet it feels like Apatow has had his distinctive stamp on almost every comedy released since 2005, when Virgin came out.

Truth be told, the list of films on which he received a writer or producer credit is a heckuva lot longer. Which goes to show, of course, that directing is not the be-all and end-all of cinematic achievement behind the camera.

But what really amazes me is not how few films he's directed, but how many films we feel like he's probably directed, or produced, or written, or in some way birthed into existence. In short, almost every comedy with a certain feel to it that comes out these days seems like it should be credited to him, even if his greatest contribution was watching a screener copy of it in his living room.

Strangely, though, of the list of films he's actually worked on, many of them are considered duds: The Cable Guy (producer), Celtic Pride (writer/executive producer), Kicking & Screaming (the Will Ferrell one -- executive producer), Fun With Dick and Jane (writer), Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (writer/producer), Drillbit Taylor (producer), You Don't Mess With the Zohan (writer) and Year One (producer). (I have to add an asterisk on The Cable Guy, which is one of my all-time favorites -- but it's quite true that at the time of its release, it was considered a massive dud.)

If I'm going to list the duds, I should also list the movies that were mostly considered a success: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (producer), Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (producer), Superbad (producer), Forgetting Sarah Marshall (producer), Pineapple Express (story by/producer) and Step Brothers (producer).

There are a couple interesting things about these lists:

1) Other than the three movies he both wrote and directed, most of his actual screenwriting credits are sort of duds. Does that mean he's the only one who can translate his own vision, or were they just bad scripts?

2) Many of them do not feel like what we consider to be "Judd Apatow movies." Celtic Pride? You Don't Mess With the Zohan? Year One?

So what is a "Judd Apatow movie," anyway? It seems in his three directing hits (ha -- I'm already assuming Funny People will be a hit), he's established a certain template. Namely, ordinary shlubs get into generally ordinary jams that are made more funny by the extraordinary prism through which Apatow observes them. Funny People may diverge from that a bit -- Seth Rogen's character is ordinary, while Adam Sandler's is a famous comedian. But it's the Seth Rogen part that really feels like bona fide Apatow.

When Apatow goes high concept, on the other hand, he flames out. (I discussed this a bit here.)

Now let's look at another list, one that I've come up with, of movies that seem to owe their existence to Apatow, and we see how big the phenomenon really is. The Hangover. Observe and Report. The Promotion. Sex Drive. Tropic Thunder. I Love You, Man. Old School. Miss March. I'm probably missing a few obvious ones, but you get the idea.

Yeah, some of those are mostly because they feature Apatow regulars -- Rogen is the star of Observe and Report, Ferrell appears in Old School (though that was released before Apatow got big, so it's cheating to include it), and Tropic Thunder featured Apatow collaborator Ben Stiller as director and star. In fact, Tropic Thunder is kind of like the high-concept Apatow, only good -- and if we're going there, we could include films like Get Smart (featuring Virgin star Steve Carell) and Land of the Lost (featuring Ferrell).

But am I crazy, or do you automatically look for Apatow's name on IMDB when these films come out? Like only a handful of other creative talents of his time (such as Steven Soderbergh and, to a less interesting extent, Tim Burton), Apatow has developed a posse of actors with whom he regularly works, which we identify with him. And because that posse is both ever-expanding (in quantity) and extremely successful (in quality), Apatow's influence fans outward likewise.

I don't know if these scattered collection of thoughts have produced a coherent point. But if there is one, it's this: Apatow has reshaped comedy in his own image, and like no single person who's been working this decade, his very name gives a project instant credibility -- instant wanna-see-ability. And we tend to forget/overlook/forgive how many of them actually failed to deliver.

Sure enough, I wanna see Funny People.

Meet you in line this weekend?

Step aside, Baron Cohen

I haven't seen Bruno, but I have the sense it could be the beginning of the end for Sacha Baron Cohen.

It seems to be liked by only a small percentage of the people who liked Borat, banking less than half of Borat's $128 million box office and quickly dwindling with only $3 million and change this past weekend. He doesn't have any more guerrilla personas left to play. And let's be honest -- he's a bit too weird-looking to play just "regular roles" in the movies. How many of his characters do you remember that don't have five-letter names starting with B?

Well, who needs Sacha Baron Cohen when you have Russell Brand?

When I first started writing this blog, I envisioned a periodic feature called "In praise of ..." and then the name of some film personality (most likely an actor or actress) who I was feeling particularly jolly about at the moment. The first one was to be "In praise of ... Emma Stone," and was to have hyped the co-star of The House Bunny and Superbad, the spunky young talent who's like an intelligent version of Lindsay Lohan. But that was right at the start, when I had a million other fertile ideas (or ideas I considered to be fertile -- not the same thing). This hypothetical post got pushed too far away from my viewing of House Bunny to seem time sensitive.

Well, even though I'm not calling this "In praise of ... Russell Brand," it's going to function as the de facto first in that series anyway.

Now I should say that I'm not exactly breaking fresh ground by praising Brand. In fact, I have a feeling he's already been through a couple praise cycles -- praised, then hated for awhile, then praised again, and now maybe hated again. I don't really know. I understand he's been a "love him or hate him" host of the MTV Video Music Awards. And that he made some kind of prank phone calls that got him kicked off the BBC.

Whatever. I'm here to praise his movie work. Not only was he the perfect final ingredient to push Forgetting Sarah Marshall over the top, but he just added a much-needed spice to Bedtime Stories. Well, he didn't just add it -- but I just saw the movie tonight, so I thought I'd write a little something about him. (Could that just be because I have two longer features I'd like to write before Friday, and can't summon the energy/organization/research for them now? Perhaps.)

Is he really very similar to Baron Cohen? Probably not. They're both lanky comedic personalities from England who like to push the envelope, especially in terms of staging elaborate stunts. Though Brand is known for marketing his own persona, whereas Baron Cohen is famously a chameleon without a knowable "self."

But I will say I've been enjoying him better at the movies than Baron Cohen.

Let's take his role in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Given that he plays a foppish, uber-hip rock star from England who steals the hero's girl, nine scripts out of ten would have also made him a total prat. But not this script, and not this performer. Sure, he's got some unendearing qualities, but overall, Brand's Aldous Snow is as likeable as anyone else in the movie -- I'd say more likeable, except that one of the most commendable things about the script by Jason Segel and Judd Apatow is how they give sympathetic dimension to all the film's characters. (Sarah Marshall herself is more insecure than insensitive). Instead of amassing artificial jealousy for his rival, Snow reaches out to Segel's Peter Bretter and befriends him. But not in some gooey way, either -- he's a beguiling mix of glamorous artifice and insightful forthrightness, a space cadet with his head screwed on correctly. And boy does he have style and personality.

Bedtime Stories is a lot more of a standard script -- Brand plays a hotel employee who's the best friend of Adam Sandler's character. And yes, his scenes feel a bit shoehorned in for additional comic relief. But Brand can make a bit about his character having night terrors funnier than that standard material would suggest. A lot funnier. And then there's the part of him -- his Brandness, you might say -- that you can tell has to be an improvisation from what was written for him. In his strangely-not-annoying sing-songy British accent, he weaves intelligently goofy and wry observations about the world, and pushes laughter out of us, just with his turns of phrase. My wife and I needed a pick-me-up tonight, and we both started smiling as soon as he sauntered on screen.

So what if I'm out of synch with the praise cycle for Brand. Maybe I'm supposed to hate him right now. I don't know. These "controversial" figures fall in and out of our good graces at the drop of a hat. Maybe I'm supposed to be "so over his shtick." But I'm not.

This is my blog. I can praise whoever I want.

Blockbuster goes literary

I just swung by my local Blockbuster to pick up a video at lunch, and came across a strange sight near the beginning of the new releases:

Books.

That's right, this Blockbuster video store had about a dozen best-selling hardcover novels for sale. (I assume they're for sale -- renting them would probably not be a great option).

And they weren't the novelizations of popular movies either. Just regular old best sellers, or what I can only assume are best sellers, without having a) walked close enough to see what titles they were, or b) any knowledge whatsoever of what is currently on the best seller list.

"Books," I said to the clerk, with a whimsy in my voice. "That's a new one."

I thought my little comment would prompt an explanation. But there are two types of video store clerk -- the chipper kind who will volunteer oodles of information, such as how much they like the video you're renting and any deals they're currently having, and the kind that just collects a paycheck. This was the paycheck guy.

He kind of shrugged and half-smiled.

I thought I'd find an explanation for this little business endeavor back at the office, but even googling with all the relevant search terms I could think of produced no useful results.

It's not that books and movies aren't complimentary forms of entertainment, in a way. After all, a good percentage of the movies you see originated as books, and, as I mentioned earlier, a number of the rest of them become books after the fact to reap a few more bucks.

But I do think that reading, in itself, is a strange thing to endorse at the video store. People come there specifically looking for an alternative to reading.

Maybe when I return my video, I'll find the chipper clerk, and she'll give me the skinny on why they're doing it ... and if they're moving any product.

Costly rentals

In movies that grapple with the abstract concepts of fate and chance, characters often discuss how such-and-such wouldn't have happened if they'd only been following their normal routine. Or not following their normal routine.

It can be good -- "If I hadn't stopped to tie my shoe, that falling piano would have crushed me" -- or bad -- "If only I hadn't stopped to tie my shoe, I would have missed that falling piano." (This last example would probably come from a movie about the afterlife).

Well, my own personal example of "routine followed/not followed" is bad -- though not "crushed by a piano" bad. And, of course, because it's me, it also directly involves movies themselves.

I was driving home from work Friday afternoon. In the way I'd originally envisioned the day, I planned to go straight home, collect my gym stuff, and stop at the library on the way to the gym. The library was where I needed to return three movies before 6 (or else they'd trigger a $1/day overdue fine), as well as pick up The Four Feathers and two others. The plan was to get started on watching The Four Feathers at the gym. Why The Four Feathers? Well, until my latest request list gets approved, I'm out of movies that I've seen but not yet reviewed. This one was approved for me ages ago, and I knew it would be available at this branch.

Good plan, right?

Until the part where I got reeeaaaalllly tired during the day. And decided that I'd skip the gym. We planned to go for a bike ride on Saturday, then I'd play basketball as usual on Sunday. There would be plenty of exercise in my future.

But I still had to return Gran Torino, Fool's Gold and Flash of Genius (which I did not watch) by 6 p.m. to avoid the $3 fine. So I decided to alter my route home to go by the library, which left me on the 405 North for about three exits longer than usual.

It was during that stretch, of course, that I got into a car accident.

Everybody's fine. The hood of my car is a little messed up, but it too will be fine after some body work. Body work that will probably use up most if not all of my deductible. But hey, money comes and money goes, right?

It was really stupid the way it happened. Somehow, I got the position of my feet screwed up so that my right foot was no longer aligned with the brake. I don't know if it was underneath the row of pedals or what. But when I was floating along at a placid two miles per hour in stop-and-go traffic, and it came time to avoid hitting the Lexus SUV in front of me, all my foot found was floorboard. And before I could even figure out what was happening, my Golf was humping the back of the aforementioned SUV. I say "humping" because it wasn't even a single hit and then the car stalling out. No, I must have made some kind of semi-correction involving the gas pedal, though I honestly can't remember that. At any rate, the end result was two distinct thrusts into his car before the incident ended.

A tall blond Russian kid -- even taller than me -- got out of the car and was immediately reassuring me that it was okay, even clapping me lightly on the shoulder to show his good-natured response to the event. It was the first of many extremely pleasant interactions related to my first car accident in 10 years. In fact, everyone was so pleasant -- from Yaroslav and his girlfriend, to the police officer, to the woman on the phone from the insurance agency -- that I was almost not in a bad mood about it at all. The most important thing was that his car was almost completely undamaged (a little scuffing on the rear bumper), and that they did not seem a) hurt, or b) like the kind of people to make up a fake injury just to screw me.

However, it didn't take long for me to think "If I only didn't have to return those videos ..." or "If I'd only maintained enough energy to go to the gym ..."

Of course, these are the kind of "if only"s we all want to have. If you're in a car accident, and the biggest thing that happens is you need to get some superficial body work done, you've got it a lot better than people who were seriously injured or died as a result of "not following their regular routine." That "movie moment" usually doesn't work out nearly so well for the protagonist.

Yep -- not a single falling piano in sight.

Bad recording, or bad output?

While watching Gran Torino last night, we had to do something that we usually only do for movies released in the 1930s: We turned the volume up to the maximum, without observing any measurable difference in how well we could hear the dialogue.

(There's a joke in there somewhere about Clint Eastwood being from the 1930s, about how it doesn't matter how loud you turn up the volume for deaf old men.)

We could have turned off the fan, but it's July in Los Angeles, and it's finally been really hot for the last three weeks. So we strained and squinted (because squinting helps you listen better, don't you know?) in order to hear Eastwood's gruff whispering and the the less-than-perfect English of the teenage Hmong actors. (I'll let them off the hook for their less-than-perfect acting).

Like I said, we're used to this in films that were made during the Roosevelt administration, when the original sound recordings can't be improved upon by remastering. But Gran Torino from 2008? What gives?

And it made me realize something: When reviewing a film, I will almost never criticize the sound, because I haven't figured out how to be confident that the problem is in the film, not in the equipment that's projecting it.

I think it was while watching The Da Vinci Code a couple years back that I recognized an inability to judge these things just by listening. There was something weird and warbly in the soundtrack during the final reel, and it was quite distracting. However, this being a collaboration between Ron Howard and Tom Hanks with a budget over $100 million, I knew it couldn't be a flaw in the film itself. The projection had to be at fault.

And so I've over-applied this logic to other movies with lesser means. When I've had to turn the volume down because the music came in too loud, but then turn it up again to hear the dialogue, but then hurriedly recoiled again to quieter levels when the guitars blew my ears out, I've blamed the projection, not the movie. It has to be either my TV, my DVD player or the actual way the DVD was pressed. Not the original movie. Right?

But some movies clearly deserve to have their sound mixing criticized. How am I supposed to know which ones?

It's not a rhetorical question. If you have the answer, let me know. Seriously.

I guess the domination of one type of sound (music) over another (dialogue) probably is a good tip-off, after all. But then I think about the fact that I never have this problem in the movie theater itself -- only at home. Given the number of movies where I have to do this, odds are that I'd see some of them in the theater, right? And that, therefore, it must have to do with either the DVD or my home equipment.

But my Da Vinci Code example demonstrates how you can't always trust theaters either.

Are any of my readers actual critics? If so, let me know how you handle this.

The perils of prejudging

I've slammed Matthew McConaughey several times on this blog, both directly and indirectly.

But I believe in fairness, and when I actually like a Matthew McConaughey movie, I'll say it.

Such is the case with Fool's Gold, the re-teaming of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days co-stars McConaughey and Kate Hudson. Usually when you re-team a pair of likeable stars, it's because their first go-around was terrific -- leaving the second one inevitably inferior, often by a huge margin (Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in The Runaway Bride, anyone?). In this case I found that the reverse was true -- that How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days was insufferable, and that Fool's Gold was actually quite charming.

(And if I may interrupt myself for a moment -- Fool's Gold is another case of a director who gravitates to similar titles. Andy Tennant also directed the only other movie I've seen that starts with the word "fool:" Fools Rush In. It's like Brian de Palma with Mission: Impossible and Mission to Mars all over again).

I'm not going to say I loved Fool's Gold or anything, but it did succeed quite well for me in terms of turn-your-brain-off escapism. The leads are not only charming, but have oodles of chemistry. They're involved in generally funny scenarios while trying to find sunken treasure off the coast of the Bahamas and/or the Florida Keys, many of which feature McConaughey escaping death in absurd ways. The tone is generally light (despite a modest body count), and damn it if I'm not a sucker for the setting -- even though my own trip to the Florida Keys was something less than I was hoping, that setting still holds a certain romanticism for me. I say it's "turn-your-brain-off escapism," but I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment either; I thought some of the dialogue was actually quite witty. I guess I should really call it "ignore-the-snobby-part-of-your-brain escapism."

Unfortunately, I'm the only one who seems to think Fool's Gold was worth more than a squirt of piss. Which makes me a little bit the fool, don't you think?

I called this post "The perils of prejudging" in part because that's what they had to do at my website. The film remains unreviewed -- it was one of 25 on a request list I submitted on Wednesday, and by watching it, I took a leap of faith that they'll actually approve me for it. (Now that new releases take up all the staffers' time, no one is scrambling for a Matthew McConaughey vehicle from February of 2008 -- no one but me, that is). But even without a review, it still gets a star rating -- a star rating that they determine from a general consensus of critics out there.

That star rating for Fool's Gold? One-and-a-half. Out of five.

Unconvinced that everyone else could really have hated Fool's Gold this much, I checked some of the other websites that tabulate critical responses to movies. And 1.5 stars summed it up pretty accurately.

Metacritic? Twenty-nine percent out of 100. "Generally unfavorable reviews."

Rotten Tomatoes? It gets even worse. Only 14 out of 137 critics considered it "fresh," the other 123 going for "rotten." Leaving it with a freshness rating of a measly 10%. Granted, the strict thumbs up/thumbs down scale is a bit more rigid, but still. That's as low as it gets.

The funny thing is, this doesn't mean I have to write a 1.5-star review of Fool's Gold. In fact, as I have been told, there's no such thing as a review that's too positive. After all, many of the websites that buy our content are in the business of selling these movies as DVDs. An honestly given positive review is perfect -- not only is it sincere, meaning the critic can live with him/herself, but it also helps move product.

Does it lose me credibility with my colleagues, though? Eh, only if I make a habit of it.

The one thing I do wonder -- any time I like a movie much more than other people -- is what I'm seeing that everyone else couldn't see. Am I a fool? On some level? And does a movie like Fool's Gold function as my fool's gold?

Well, I stopped analyzing any of that too closely years ago. Sometimes a movie just works for you. And as for concerns about the respect of my peers, I've been writing for them for nearly a decade. If I was going to lose credibility with them, it would have happened a long time ago.

I'm just glad that there are movies like Fool's Gold that come along sometimes -- movies I'm reviewing that I've prejudged as terrible, but end up satisfying me more than I expected. I can think of others like it, though I almost hate to list them here. Okay, twist my arm: Inspector Gadget. Without a Paddle. Swing Vote. The Story of Us. Numerous others I can't remember right now. They're all movies I reviewed, expecting to hate them; in fact, using my expected hatred -- of the star, the director, the genre -- as a reason to want to write about them in the first place.

But if these movies were all bad, that means I'd spend even more of my life's hours on drivel. Much better that some of them provide me a modicum of guilty enjoyment -- maybe even not-so-guilty enjoyment.

Fool's gold? Heck, I'll take it.

Kristin Scott Thomas goes French

When some actresses reach a "certain age," they undergo the acting industry's version of menopause. (Which, I guess, probably coincides with real menopause). The romantic lead roles they were accustomed to are no longer offered. Now they're cast as the mother of the lead, if they're cast at all.

Other actresses, like Kristin Scott Thomas, go to France.

Scott Thomas -- who first caught our attention in Four Weddings and a Funeral, before etching her place in the Movie Romance Hall of Fame with The English Patient -- is 49. That's two years younger than I guessed she was. Not that Scott Thomas looks 51. Just that I always find these people are older than you think they are, so I guess on the high end.

I've always been a fan. Kristin Scott Thomas redefines the word "elegant."

To say she has only just now gone to France is, of course, inaccurate. She's been living there since she was 19, and she's actually been getting cast in French films almost as long as English-language ones (1987 vs. 1985).

But much of the moviegoing world has perhaps not been aware of her bilingual abilities until this past year. I myself was not aware until I heard the raves for I've Loved You So Long late last year. By the time I finally saw it, last night, I'd seen Scott Thomas show up in another French film, the thriller Tell No One, a couple months earlier.

I think the reason this interests me so much is that we are accustomed to seeing foreign actresses come to Hollywood to forge a career, but we usually don't see established English-speaking actresses go the other way. And since I'm a short-sighted American, I'm a lot more impressed by an English speaker who learns another language than a foreigner who learns English.

Again this does not particularly relate to Scott Thomas, per se -- as a 30-year resident of France, she certainly didn't need to "learn" anything for her roles in I've Loved You So Long and Tell No One. Nor did Jodie Foster, I guess, when she appeared in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement. After all, Foster is a fluent French speaker who attended a French school in Los Angeles. I guess she dubs her own lines in the French-language versions of her movies.

But can I still be impressed? Is that allowed?

What I like in particular about Scott Thomas' emigration to French films is that the roles promise to continue to be interesting for her there -- to make excellent use of her elegant fragility, her steely resolve, even into her 50s. (I see she'll be in a movie called Partir later this year, which will probably hit us sometime next year).

Because just look at what she has to do here. You'd think, since she's a French citizen and actually identifies more with France than with England, that gracefully transitioning into intelligent French films would satisfy her. Unfortunately, the lure of Hollywood is still strong -- strong enough to convince her to make twaddle like Confessions of a Shopaholic. Maybe she thought her role as a terminally stylish magazine editor would give her a prominent platform like the one Meryl Streep had in The Devil Wears Prada, but I remember just feeling sorry for Scott Thomas when I watched Shopaholic. The movie wasn't worthy of her, and it brought her down to its level.

But since then I've seen Tell No One, in which she played a whimsical middle-aged lesbian, and I've Loved You So Long, in which she plays a woman returning to the world after 15 years in prison for murder. I'd say she was brilliant in both, but her role in Tell No One was relatively inconsequential to the plot. In I've Loved You So Long, though, she's front and center, and knocks your socks off.

The vintage Kristin Scott Thomas is still with us -- even if we have to read subtitles to get her.

The magic of 300

No, not the number of Spartans who tried to fight off the entire Persian army at the Battle of Thermopylae.

Rather, the word count of my film reviews.

That's right, I've been on a strict self-imposed diet of 300 words per review since about 2001. I say it's self-imposed, but the guideline actually originated with my employers. I don't recall the actual wording of their passage on this in the style book, but it conveyed the fact that we should be able to say what we needed to say about a film in 300 words or less -- whether it was Freddy Got Fingered or Citizen Kane.

Since many writers regularly broke it without penalty, the guideline was just that -- a guideline. But I thought it made sense, especially since we weren't breaking up our reviews into multiple paragraphs. One big chunk on a page gets a little unwieldy after 300 words.

As a newcomer, I was amazed by the thrilling economy displayed by some of my predecessors. In fact, although it certainly could have been beefed up, the review for Raiders of the Lost Ark feels pretty much complete, even at a scant 154 words.

I've never been able to be anywhere near that concise, nor would I really want to be -- even though I don't get paid that much, I feel like 150 words is stealing their money. But what strikes me as funny is that I pretty much do end up writing 300 words, whether it's a frivolous movie I hate, or a classic movie I love. The few times I've broken the rule, deciding that this or that film was good enough to deserve 375-400 words (a decision fully endorsed by my editors), I've always felt a bit like a failure afterward -- like I indulged, like I couldn't make tough choices, like I couldn't consolidate my commentary to what really mattered. Even though I break this rule only when I have too much to say about a movie I love -- say, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer -- I still feel bad afterward, like a less-is-more approach would have served the movie better.

A lot of time, I take these 300 words literally. I know no one is counting but me, but 301 words is one too many. You can always find a word to cut, no matter how tight you think your writing is. And it's a good lesson -- it makes you a better writer. It's not a lesson I follow too often on my blog, I'll grant you that -- I let the flab hang out. (Maybe I'm not as concerned about the consequences, even though I certainly should care whether you keep reading or not.) But I love the challenge in my reviews. Even when I'm up to 325, and I don't think it's possible, I can always get down to 300, and I'll have that much better a piece of writing to show for it.

Of course, such brevity is only possible due to the unique structure of the website I write for. Until recently, the reviews themselves bore no responsibility for explaining the plot. That task was left up to the plot synopsis, a separate piece of writing on a separate tab of the movie's home page. When our reviews appeared on other websites without such tabs, the synposes would appear alongside them, an indispensable companion piece to the review. This allowed us to just get straight down to it, to use our 300 words for breathless praise or snide sarcasm, rather than the who's who and the what's what.

Lately, however, there's been a change. My company's business is to provide content to other websites, which is why I see my name pop up in the darnedest of places. Lately, the company has become the sole provider of new online reviews for an institution with whom you are well acquainted -- in the interest of blogger anonymity, I won't reveal it here. And as a result of this new agreement, the review and the synopsis now appear as one, bulging the review's total size out to 700, 800, even 1,000 words.

The new system is a lot more like a regular long-form review you'd see in the newspaper, or in a magazine. But it's a lot less like the format I've gotten comfortable with over nearly ten years of writing only the review portion. I've written exactly five reviews of new releases in this format, and in each case, I've agonized over it. And in each case, I've breathed a sigh of relief when I could return to my regular format, the one I use on the back catalog of older films -- you know, like Seven Up, the documentary released in 1963, which I reviewed today.

This is a problem for two reasons:

1) Every critic aspires to write long-form reviews.

2) Every critic aspires to review new releases.

To hide behind my perfect 300 words is to shy away from both those goals.

The funny thing is, my consternation is not because I'm no good at writing plot synopses. I've written some 50 synopses for the site over the years, and they're much faster than reviews. I find it pretty easy to encapsulate what's important to know about a film without crossing over into that slippery territory of spoiling the surprises. In fact, if all I did was synopsize films all day, it would almost be a good substitute for reviewing them.

It's working the synopsis organically into the body of the review that really gets me.

I've found no better way than to follow this paragraph structure: 1) Opening with general thesis about the movie; 2) Synopsis; 3/4) More substantive analysis and closing thoughts.

So what's wrong with that? Eh, I don't know, it's just been bothering me.

I feel like there should be a good way to weave plot into my criticism, but I just haven't figured it out yet. I know other critics can do it. But I haven't figured out how to do it without that line of demarcation between plot and opinion, the line of demarcation that comes at the end of a paragraph.

And now I realize what it is -- it's not going over that perfect 300-word threshold that bothers me. It's going into that second paragraph (and the third, and the fourth). I don't really want to "outline" a review -- to figure out what I might say, when. I just want to string the sentences together from my witty opening to my zinging final line. Forget all the "structure" that comes between. A couple reviews I've written in the past have been split into two paragraphs. I've always thought it didn't look right, because I didn't write it to be split.

It's worked for me for nearly 10 years -- why change now?

Well, the answer is, it's worked for me for nearly 10 years. Comfort zones are made to be broken. Aspirations take effort to achieve. Who knows what forms my future reviewing will take, but if I stay content with 300-word reviews that earn me only slightly more that my costs, what will I really have?

A long, unchanging career where I must always keep a primary job to stay afloat.

So maybe 300 words is as much my curse as my blessing. Maybe, on my next assignment, I'll bust it open with pleasure, and indulge in those freedoms that more words can give me.

Hey, I guess it works on my blog, if you're still reading this.