Greed apparently not always good

Oliver Stone is looking to make a Wall Street sequel.

As long as we're going with bad ideas, why not follow in the footsteps of the ultimate bad-idea man, George Lucas, and have an entire awful trilogy to crap all over the magnificent creation of your youth?

Wall Street: The Phantom Prosperity
Wall Street: Attack of the CDO's
Wall Street: Revenge of the Socialists

Best part? Shia Labeouf is up for it. You know, I'm a nice guy. I don't wish harm on anyone. But it's really hard not to wish at least some harm on Shia.

And I say this as one who enjoyed the odd Even Stevens episode as a guilty pleasure.

His good movie to bad movie ratio is skewed way to the dark side. This isn't, in and of itself, a reason to wish him harm, of course. There are lots of people who don't make good movies and never have that bother me little to not at all. But his failures tend to involve the steaming wreckage of beloved childhood memories of mine. Yes, Transformers was okay. But the last Indy film was an abomination. (fn1)

Wall Street is a good movie. It encapsulated its time well. I agree that the current financial mess could serve as a good backdrop for a movie. But, Oliver, please. Let some young auteur with a fresh take and feel for the times take a crack at it. Don't try to wedge Gekko into it. Don't ruin what we had with some half-baked cash-in staring that sack of overwhelmed youngster that is Shia.

I leave you with a link to Talking Heads This must be the place, the song playing as Charlie Sheen outfits his new apartment in Wall Street. Good tune, I always smile when it comes up on my iPod.


fn1: South Park had a memorable episode in which the kids are traumatized from having seen Indy getting raped. The rape being, of course, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Which I still haven't seen. And probably won't because while it was fun to watch the Nazis' faces melt when they looked in the Ark in Raiders, I fear that something similar would happen to me upon witnessing Crystal Skull.

Super Apology

I picture my apology in the last post along the lines of Superman's apology for his absence during General Zod's attack.

You can watch it here, at about the 20 second mark:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kLUzPSvltY

Please note that I do not make Superman's promise that "I won't let you down again."(fn1)

fn1: Although, in all honesty, how seriously can we take his promise given that the latest Superman movie's premise is that Superman I and II happened and after that Superman left Earth for a decade or so? Clearly, he did leave Earth on it's own again and it was just lucky that no cataclysmic disasters befell us in that time.

It's in Belgium.

So a ways back, when the sun yet shone, before the dark times, before... The Bailout, I took a trip to Florida.

We took some Netflix with us. One of those movies was a little oddball comedy that had intrigued me since I had first seen its trailer but, like most movies, I never got around to seeing in the theater or in the first few months of its DVD release.

This was In Bruges.

I am happy to report that I enjoyed it. I should start by saying that I was surprised to even be intrigued by it way back at first viewing of the trailer as Colin Farrell has a long history of making awful, awful movies. Just awful. I'm not actually sure why he's a movie star because in addition to being awful, I'm under the impression that many of his movies don't make money.

You'd think that making bad, expensive, money-losing films would be a career-ender but the ways of Hollywood are mysterious indeed. Maybe I should get a job in that industry next, work my death-touch magic on those big bags of useless.

Anyways. In Bruges.

Very odd movie. Reminded me of a play in that it had very tight dialogue and a fairly intricately woven plot that didn't actually go very far but kept circling over on itself and putting in clever little references to earlier seemingly throw-away lines so that the whole thing ended up being very enjoyable indeed.

I should point out, before everyone goes rushing out to rent it on my good say-so, that it was a very dark and fairly violent comedy. I'm not sure that most people would like it. My girl, for example, was not as taken with it as I was, though she enjoyed it as well.

She particularly liked a certain line of Ralph Fiennes that was very reminscent of a joke I use far too often. If you know me you will likely recognize the joke when you see it in the movie. (Though his character is not using the line in a joking manner, it is clearly a joke in the overall movie.)

I give it three stars. Good flick.

Speaking of violence...

I finally got around to seeing the movie Funny Games.

It was... Hmm. It was... different.

Note: there are spoilers here. Though I'm not sure this is the kind of movie that can be spoiled, per se.

For anyone who may not know, the story is basically of an amazingly wholesome and rich looking family of three (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, some kid) who head out to their vacation house. Once there, they are visited by two amazingly-wholesome-looking young men who proceed to force them into playing a series of sadistic and torturous games that culminate with the death of the entire family.

The critical reception was interestingly mixed. The critics seemed to fall into two camps: one which felt the movie was a triumph as it is technically wonderful and they felt the writer/director Michael Haneke (Austrian fellow, in fact the American version is a shot-for-shot remake of the Austrian original) was making a statement about the rise of voyeuristic thrill-seeking in recent uber-violent cinema (Saw, Hostel, Touristas, we're looking in your direction); the other camp felt that the movie was an uber-violent, voyeuristic thrill-ride and as such was no more redeeming than the Saws, Hostels, Toursistas et al, any cinematographic excellence aside.

First off, the movie is beautifully shot. Just amazing. The things the director does with camera angles alone were quietly phenomenal. Also the acting was, I felt, v. solid. Well done all around.

The violence -- which is significant and wholly unreedeming in the sense that there is no comeuppance and absolutely no reason or explanation for it of any kind -- is largely kept off screen in the strictest sense. That is, the worst things happen out of sight of the audience, sometimes only just, but out of sight nonetheless. Not having seen any of the Saws, Hostels, etc. I don't know if they handle their extreme violence the same way, but my sense is that they do not. That is, in those movies, you watch the actual violent acts; here you mostly watch the results of the torture.

I think that makes a difference. I don't know if the director was trying to make a statement about the audience's complicity in the rise of uber-violent cinema. V. probably he was: the main antagonist repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to confer with the audience about what they'd like to see happen next. But ultimately, I'm not sure that it matters if this was his intention or not. If it works on that level, it works on that level. If it has redeeming qualities, if it is, in a word, Art, then it is Art regardless of the intent of the director, yes? Perhaps not, I've never given a tremendous amount of thought to the philosophy of art.

Anyways, I thought it worked. On whatever level. It was engrossing and not in a visceral, I-like to-watch-people-get-tortured-way. More in an intellectual, these-characters-are-tremendously-disturbing, unlike-your-average-character, and-this-difference-makes-them-interesting kind of way. Their interactions were interesting.

So, in a nutshell, I thought the movie fell much more into the "triumph" bucket than the "travesty" bucket. But I can see how others might be too disturbed or uncomfortable with the ambiguity of the message to feel the same.

On a related note, I feel there's been a rise in the nihilistic antagonist in recent years. These two were of a piece with Heath Ledger's incarnation of the Joker: they are violent, they twist and destroy societal norms and there is no reason why, they just do. It makes one wonder what the Dark Knight folks could have done if they had the freedom to stray further from the comic-book template they were working with. Clearly, the Joker was not going to win. Funny Games, by contrast, was under no such constraint.

Let's all go to the lobby...

A list of movies I truly enjoyed, in no particular order:

Cool Hand Luke
There Will Be Blood
True Romance
The Godfather
GoodFellas

Lot of violence on that list. Wonder if there's something wrong with me.

How I spent my day...

Talking about the Dark Knight with some other hard-core obsessives here.

We've begun plotting the next movie...

Public Notice

Please be advised that the recent film "The Dark Knight" was very good and just plain fantastic for a super-hero film. If you are going to express contrary opinions, please consider the effect this will have on any listener's opinion of your intelligence and taste and preferably only express them in the solitude of your closet, at night, alone.

Please do not express them at work, in the cube next to mine.

Good grief, these are different chuckleheads than the cultural illiterates I heard bad-mouthing "There Will Be Blood" but, honestly, what kind of people do I work with here?

Public Notice

There Will Be Blood is an excellent, excellent movie.

People who do not share this opinion should take care not to air it in public for fear someone whose taste in movies is not abominable will overhear.

Don't say you weren't warned when you lose the respect of your betters over your horrid taste in movies.