Buttery, with a hint of rosemary
Artist Chris Ware has bedazzled bedecked this month's The New Yorker with four different Thanksgiving-themed covers. The NY website also features a tie-in comic strip and a short MP3 interview. Good stuff, if you are hip to Ware's meticulous, designerly style. Love that 4th cover ("Main Course").
It's like a high-brow version of the multi-cover gimmicks comic book companies would push on "investment speculators" (and college students with more money than sense) in the early 90's. Why only buy the regular edition of Ghost Rider #1 when you can snag an over-priced glow-in-the-dark variant cover as well? Sign me up, Shopkeep! Ah, good times.
Bond Rebooted
Saw Casino Royale Sunday evening. As you may have heard, this new Daniel Craig guy does indeed manage to execute an effective refresh of Ian Flemming's superfly secret agent (version 6.0).
The Royale Bond hasn't yet churned through the countless missions for Queen and Country that produce the suave Connery/Brosnan lady charmer of past films. No, the lamination on Mr. Craig's License to Kill is still warm, and while he does exude a sort of cruel charisma, there is an enjoyable unpolished austere to his job performance. Different, but not too different.
The Good: The first fifteen minutes of the movie feature a chase scene with hair-raising stunts in such rapid-fire succession that I actually stopped breathing and four out of five senses shut down to give my brain the additional cycles needed to process all the action. Totally awesome.
Fun to see Bond putter around in a Ford (!) and then earn the Aston Martin.
The Bad Guy's sinister plans, and in turn the scope of the plot, are far more modest than the world-dominating agendas of yore. Since it really doesn't matter why Mr. Villian is on Bond's bad side, may as well keep it within the realm of possibility (death lasers and killer satellites, while plenty fun, aren't actually required).
The Bad: Act Two and Three don't quite live up to the pace, dialogue, and story delivered in Act One.
The soundtrack is only serviceable and didn't feature more than a mild flavor of the classic James Bond theme.
At 144 minutes, it runs a bit long. Could've done without some of that romancin'...
The Ugly: Mr. Villian sports the most proposterous poker "tell" since John Malkovich's oreo gorging habit in Rounders.
No Q? No Moneypenny? Really?
The explanation, for the sake of non-gamblers, as to what's going on during said poker game is ridiculously heavy handed.
Uh, the bunny's not breathin...
A teaser-type trailer for The Simpsons Movie premiered last night on, of course, Family Guy The Simpsons. Woohoo!
Clever that they differentiate themselves from the computer-generated animation that's all the rage these days - highlighting the simple traditionally drawn 2D style we've been enjoying on the tube for purt-near one score years. Makes it kinda ironic though, how the vehicles (wrecking ball, etc) in the trailer are computer generated and cell-shaded for that hand-drawn appearance. Almost, but not quite seamless. The same technique is all over Futurama.
"Season Shot is made of tightly packed seasoning bound by a fully biodegradable food product. The seasoning is actually injected into the bird on impact seasoning the meat from the inside out. When the bird is cooked the seasoning pellets melt into the meat spreading the flavor to the entire bird. Forget worrying about shot breaking your teeth and start wondering about which flavor shot to use!"
Flags and Letters
Clint Eastwood has directed a film to complement his recent Flags of Our Father. FoOF chronicles the Battle of Iwo Jima and that famous photo of some GIs raising the flag atop Mt. Suribachi. This new second effort, Letters from Iwo Jima, is the same island invasion story, now from the Japanese perspective. Stars Ken Watanabe. Further details over at the Wikipedia. Trailers right here. Scheduled for a limited US release in December.
The whole concept is very impressive. Shades of Beowulf and Grendel. Has there been a set of movies about two different sides of the same story?
Quick Flags of Our Father review: It's great every time the camera is rolling through the war footage. The whole thing goes down between Saving Private Ryan-style bookends ("Martha, tell me I've led a good life...") of unnecessary, overly sentimental retrospection. There's a bit of repetition whenever the film leaves the shores of Iwo Jima and flash-forwards us to the flag-raising soldiers forced to stump around for the war effort in mid-40's America. I get it. It wasn't all fun and glory. Can we get back to the drama and turmoil of the battle, where there's a reasonably compelling story?
Schmaltz and repetition aside, it's of course a very solid film - which is the only kind Eastwood ever seems to deliver.
