fine whine

[this entry is backdated -- still no connectivity at the house]

Yard work has been exhausting the last several days, but still somehow I've been able to sandwich in some prime movie time with my one-two DVD player punch of my Sony PS2 and my Philips DVD724AT.

(For those of you now joining us having searched for that DVD player, it's a nice DVD player that can be made region-free--though you will need to track that down yourself--and has pretty decent video output for both NTSC and PAL on my NTSC television over the component connections. It plays .mpg files, not just VCDs, and also has a somewhat decent but also cumbersome MP3 player built in. Unfortunately, it knows nothing of ID3 tags, or even long file names, so that's troublesome, I guess. Moreover it cannot randomize playlists, but for something given to me as a gift I'm still quite happy with it two years later. Now back to your regularly scheduled entry).

I apologize for that brief interlude, but I must admit to a little guilt at having a moderately decent page rank for many searches that are mere name-droppings here whereas people are searching for real information. It's only a little guilt.

The people for whom I feel bad are the people who find me by searching for movie titles, hoping for some insightful information or the like. Bah. Let them search. I'm merely trying to keep track of what I've watched, now that my Palm IIIx (with which I am very much satisfied) lost its data temporarily due to a lack of fresh AAAs. And so on and blah blah blah...

Basically, I've watched some movies lately. Here is a quick list and my thoughts on them.

• Pootie Tang is just a bizarre movie. I recall hearing or reading an interview with one of the creators, which revealed his dislike for the finished product and moreover his loss of control. I guess it got butchered, and having watched it that's an easy story to believe. That said, the whole idea's a difficult one to pull off, and similar projects (as similar as anything can be) have only had relative success, judged primarily on the vehemence of their respective fan clubs (see The adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in the eighth dimension for an example of this.
• Dirty pretty things was good. It's being sold on the basis of having Audrey Tautou (previously brilliant in Am�lie) but she's not the star. Chiwetel Ejiofor's Okwe is a compelling lead, the man with a dark past and a doctorate reduced to cabbie and doorman in a land of opportunity. Newcomer Benedict Wong steals the show whenever he's on the screen, but the whole cast is top notch and I'd say that the filmmakers succeeded in whatever they were trying to do. For following a film recommendation picked up on NPR, I think I came out okay on this one.
• The Ladykillers, being the 1955 version with Alec Guinness, not the Coen Brothers remake with Tom Hanks, was enjoyable enough. Had I watched this with a bunch of people I'd likely have started a chant of "END!" about two thirds of the way through. The film's funny, but drags out the idea far too long. It holds up well for a fifty year old movie, though. Like Dirty pretty things it's ostensibly set in London, but nothing really stands out as particularly British about the proceedings. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to tough out exactly what I mean by that.
• Confessions of a dangerous mind was pretty good, if not a little scattershot and heavy-handed in bits and pieces. Overall I liked it, but likely mostly on the overall agreeableness of Sam Rockwell. Clooney as an actor could well have been replaced by anybody without hurting the finished product too much, but without him as a director it likely would have been different, though I can't really say for better or for worse. I find myself agreeing with a review I found somewhere condemning Drew Barrymore for lazily playing her standard character, even down to characteristic still photos used here and there in the DVD menus. Speaking of the menus, there is a really neat segment in one deleted scene, whereby pianos are dropped on both an old lady and her poodle. Trust me on this. Also be baffled with me as to why this disc would contain not only the trailer for the unknown comedy View from the top, Eddie Griffin's live Disfunktional family and Kill Bill (before it was bifurcated, even) but not the film itself! Here was a movie that (I am ashamed to admit) was sold to me on the basis of the trailer alone, and they didn't even put one in. Lazy, lazy DVD producers. It was a pretty good trailer. Hell, the movie was pretty good too.

There was another one or two in there somewhere but alas, I've forgotten them already.