In Good Company

Grade: A+

Fantastic gem of a film that presents both sides of a classic conflict.

This story has been done before. Established veteran of a company is shocked to learn someone new has become his boss. Even the twist on this basic story–the fact that the replacement is half the veteran’s age–has been done as well. But what makes this movie so great is that it has actual feelings for both characters. You understand and sympathize with both the veteran and the young up-and-comer. You know where they’re coming from, you know why they’re doing what they’re doing. The film does this so well that when you get to the point where the young boss calls in the entire team for a Sunday work session you actually sympathize with both the boss, yearing for companionship, and the veteran, angry at having to work on a Sunday.

The only small downside is Scarlet Johansson. Granted, I’ve only seen her in two or three films, but she seems to be playing the same part in all of them. Is she another one-note actress, ala Julia Stiles? I hope not.

But even Johansson fits into her role here, so it’s a small downside, if any. It’s an amazing script, director and cast that can pull off the range required in this movie. It takes a number of important themes–business, responsibility, parenthood, family–and mixes them into a fantastic story. This is one of those movies that really is more than the sum of its parts.

Watch it, you’ll see.

White Noise

Grade: C-

A movie that shows how a good story can be ruined by bad writing.

The premise of the movie is decent enough. Man’s wife dies and starts to communicate with him via Electronic Voice Phenomenon–the practice of recording static and hearing voices, etc. Simple enough, spooky enough. Then they kick it up a notch with some evil spirits who want to communicate (and maybe do some other stuff) as well, then add in the man’s wife may actually be showing her husband people who are alive that he can save, and suddenly you’ve got a better story.

The problem here is that the writing is horrible. Whole scenes fall flat under horrible dialogue or unbelievable lines. And as the movie plods along, you also wonder if the writer or editor or studio is responsible for the utter mess of an ending. The ending tries to be different from other horror/thriller films out there, but it falls flat. The only scares come from cheap surprise and clever sound editing, with any scary story elements quickly losing weight under the bad script.

This is a great example of how a bad writer can ruin a good story. With a great writer, this could have been a classic.

Syriana

Grade: D

Not sure if this is a story or a message, but it fails on both fronts.

I was really looking forward to Syriana, with all the excellent reviews and an interesting topic. But I was sorely disappointed. Like Crash, another movie about a hot topic that uses too many plotlines to address the issue, I felt the movie didn’t meet expectations. That made it frustrating, and an overall bad experience in the theater. I tried to let this movie simmer over the past month, that and the server crash have delayed my review. But the good news is that if you haven’t seen it you probably won’t, unless you’re really interested in seeing every movie that has an Oscar nomination. Clooney will get one, even though he isn’t all that good. But politics is politics, even in Hollywood.

If the movie is just a story it’s a jumbled mess. Too many plotlines are followed, some of them having absolutely no impact on the overall story except that if they hadn’t followed this one character then when he reaches his storyline’s climax you would have been annoyed that it came out of left field. Too much is left unexplained–the connections between governments, spy agencies, oil organizations and terrorist groups are hinted at but never explored. That leaves you guessing as to motivation or, more harmful to the movie, just what the hell’s going on.

If the movie is a message it’s a confused message. Leaving the theater you aren’t sure who the good guys or bad guys are in the end. The Arab leader who wanted to drive the US out of his country to advance his people’s fortunes? His brother who didn’t care about his people but continues the US relations? Matt Damon’s power broker (literally and figuratively) who sells out his personal interests to take up a cause, only to abandon them when it fails? His wife who leaves him but takes him back when his dreams fail? Clooney’s torturing/assassinating spy who gets tortured? His torturer who’s fighting against an extreme government? The extreme government that hates the US but works with them behind closed doors?

If the point of the movie was to say that too many groups are connected and we can’t figure out how oil plays into the whole political spectrum, we already knew that. We’ve had a few wars in recent years to drive home that point. So what does the movie bring to the table that a newspaper can’t? I guess it has George Clooney and Matt Damon.

In that event, Ocean’s 12 should have sparked a brilliant debate on repeat offenders outside the justice system.

Bah.

Greatest Invention Ever

The person who invented the baby wipes warmer should win a Nobel Prize or something. Pure genius.

Remember when I thought something like TiVo was the greatest invention ever. And that was only last month!

Love Monkey

Grade: C

Will somebody please give talented comedic actors a decent show?

Tom Cavanaugh is very, very funny. His previous series, Ed, was fantastic the first year, then slowly collapsed under the weight of trying to make it appeal to more people. But Cavanaugh has great charisma, great expressions, just a really funny guy. Ed was basically a prolonged love story, so his new series has decided to go the same route. Only now he’s a record label guy instead of an attorney. Otherwise, same character.

Which is really a shame. His stints on Scrubs as Zach Braff’s brother were fantastic, showing he has more than just TV romantic comedy chops. Instead, he’s being typecast as a quirky, slightly off guy looking for love. This show is an hour-long, more dramatic Sex in the City. But with guys instead of girls.

But it took a funky turn in the first episode, which makes me think this one won’t last. See, the main character gets fired and dumped in the same week. Bad week, right? So he decides to start his own label and wonders if his ex was the girl for him.

His best friend, a girl, tells him he’s being selfish. Because, you know, it’s selfish to follow your dream of starting a label. And it’s totally selfish to wonder if your last girlfriend was the one for you. So he abandons his label, gets a job (basically doing what he would have with his own label, but now he’s working for someone) and decides to play it cool when he meets the girl of his dreams.

This isn’t a series. This is a life that can be fixed in five minutes. Somebody take him by the shoulders (perhaps one of his three male friends who are totally supportive in the most unsupportive ways imaginable) and yell, “Grow a set, dude!”

But no, we’ll get male 30-something angst for a few episodes before it gets cancelled.

In the meantime, can someone with a decent comedic script save Tom Cavanaugh and Neil Patrick Harris from their current mediocre-to-bad shows? Put these two together and you’d really have something.

About the blog

So the few readers I have had may have noticed the extended absence on the blog. Bunch of things contributed to this. A birth here, a server crash there, all around the same time.

The server crash ended up taking all the posts since September 9 or so. Thanks to several search engine’s caches and some friends who subscribe to the blog with their own readers, I was able to recover all but 9 of the posts. Not bad for a total of 50 or so actually deleted.

Most comments were lost–I found a few on some caches and put them in the body of the text where I could. Graphics are gone and not worth the time to find and repost. Format may be off as well, but the content is there.

A HUGE thank you to Raine, who recovered a good chunk of the blog posts and whose personal cache made many others possible to be recovered. I owe her big time, which means I’ll be working on my short story again sometime soon (since she’s the only one who’s read it, I think). Kinda bummed that her blog was lost as well, since I had wanted to catch up on it this past week. But crashes happen.

Home Theater…done?

Not that a true home theater is ever really done, since it’s just waiting for the next upgrade or tweak, but at risk of bringing down the Gods of Technological Glitches, several dozen Gremlins, and even Murphy himself, my home theater is done.

Is it perfect? Hells no. (Squirrel, please!) Biggest issue is the projector alignment, which due to me being a complete novice, is a little bit off from the screen. Satan, thy name is RPA mount, a supposed universal bracket that can install the projector to the ceiling and let you adjust it an infinite number of ways to get the perfect alignment. Maybe I haven’t figured it all out, or maybe I did it wrong, but I just can’t get the image to be perfectly square on the screen. Oh, it fits, and fits pretty well. But the problem is that while the top edge of the picture matches the screen exactly, the bottom does not. And not uniformly–the bottom right corner of the image hits the bottom right corner of the screen. But the bottom left corner of the image drops about 2 inches below the bottom left corner of the screen. The result is that if you have an image with horizontal lines on it, on the top they’re perfectly flat, but by the bottom they have a slight slant.

It’s slightly noticeable if you don’t know to look for it. It’s definitely noticeable if you do know to look for it. But the problem here is that to get a professional to come out and remount the projector or fix the whole thing is estimated to take 3-4 hours at $100/hour. I like my home theater a lot, and I figure it’s about 80% as good as it could be with professional work–so now the question is whether I want to spend $300-$400 to get it to 100%. I’ll have to see if it’s worth it as I start watching movies. If it really annoys me, maybe it will be worth it. It’d be a shame to come this far only to have it not be 100% or as close as possible. But for now, I’m happy with a bright image, good sound, and a whopping 92 inches of goodness staring me in the face.

Besides, those extra hundreds could be put towards the next step: a better receiver. One that can handle 7.1 audio and not just 5.1. And multiple component inputs. Turns out my receiver doesn’t even handle one, but I bought an inexpensive switcher at Radio Shack that will hopefully do the trick. I haven’t even hooked it up yet, nor the HD cable box I got last Friday. Too hectic. Never thought I’d see the day where I fail to connect my HDTV source for going on 4 days, but such is life.

Oh, and the problem of what movie to break in the theater with has been solved thanks to an excellent Chanukah gift by Mrs. Hose: Batman Begins. A movie I initially gave only an A, but which grew on me more and more after I saw it and ended up being on my Top 10 list of 2005 movies (select Hose’s list to see it). Schweet!

King Kong (2005)

Grade: A+

A movie that starts big and ends up growing on you.

This is a long, long movie. But it moves so quickly, you don’t mind. You realize the length, especially after the twentieth chase scene or the fiftieth time a new monster appears on the island or the tenth time someone appears from nowhere with a bigger, better gun to save the day. But even when you know how long this is going, you’re having fun with each scene. The only slow scenes are at the beginning, which perhaps could have been cut but since they’re at the start, you don’t care as much. Other than those, the scenes getting to know Kong are a bit slower, but perhaps the most enjoyable of the film.

Outside of those few moments (and they are few, no doubt), this is wall-to-wall excitement. It’s over the top, it’s not realistic, but by framing it in the early 20th century, it makes the fantasy easier to swallow. Uncharted island? Okay. Nasty natives? Naturally. Giant gorilla? Well, we knew that one. Dinosaurs? Call Spielberg! Gigantic bugs? Tell Spielberg to cut it out! Stampede? Run with it! Run with the stampede? Just watch out for those–ah, too late!

The movie grows on you too, not for any reason other than it’s fun to watch. Yes, it’s long, but you don’t have the sense that you need to finish a giant trilogy like Jackson’s last films. This is just a big adventure and you get to escape from the real world, with real-sized, less-interesting gorillas, for a few hours. Great value for the money.

The only quibbles, and they’re minor, are the male leads. Adrian Brody never came across as quite believable. And Jack Black takes a huge turn for the worse that seems out of character given how he played his part in the first 2/3 of the movie. But, again, very minor quibbles.

Finally, another big round of kudos to the Drafthouse for creating an intermission during the show. For the break between Skull Island and Manhattan, they took a much needed break in the show. They put up Jack Black’s Kong song from SNL earlier in the year, and it was a great idea to let people take a bathroom break before the final scenes. The Drafthouse rocks so much, it’s scary.