Déjà Vu (The movie)

[migrated from myspace blog]

I don't know what theory of time travel the writers of this movie subscribe to, but it doesn't seem to be one that makes sense, in my opinion. If you haven't seen the movie, you probably won't really understand what I mean. (Before I go any further, I have to give credit to the writer/direct/or producer who made one of the best Beach Boys songs they ever recorded a central element of the movie.)

The reason believed Doug could go to the past and change things is because he saw (again) the message on Claire's refrigerator, which we should know from the beginning of the movie, he sent to himself. Here's where it starts to fall apart. When he arranged the letters on the fridge, Claire was alive, and Doug knew she could be saved, but when he received the message, she hadn't been saved from Carroll. When we see him arrange the letters, Claire is already saved, and future Doug will never get the message because her house will never be part of the criminal investigation.

I feel like I'm about to go into some circular Joseph Heller logic here. If Doug stops the explosion from happening, then Doug never goes back in time to stop the explosion from happening. The explosion has to happen in order for the chain of events that leads to Doug going back in time to occur. Only then can he stop the explosion. But if he stops it, he never even knows that it's possible to go back in time, and the explosion will still happen. This entire movie is one big paradox.

Grrrrr!!! Fox cancels Drive

[migrated from myspace blog]

I should have expected as much from the network that canceled Firefly after airing the episodes out of order and not airing the pilot until the end. 4 episodes (if you count the 2-hour premiere as 2)? Ridiculous! I now believe the 5th Graders from Are You Smarter Than...are in charge over there.

My email to Fox:

Is there ANYONE at the network that's smarter than a 5th Grader?! Firefly, now Drive. You people are nuts. You don't deserve to have the talents of Nathan Fillion and Tim Minear in your filthy Simon Cowell-infested studios.

Exclusive: Fox Cancels Drive

Drive has been impounded.

Multiple sources confirm that Fox has axed the Tim Minear creation after less than three weeks on the air. I'll go out on a limb and say the show's crappy ratings were to blame. House encores will take over its Monday/8 pm time slot.

There is one piece of good news: I'm hearing the final two unaired Drive eps may get burned off on consecutive Fridays in May.

Developing...

Re-Bourne

[migrated from myspace blog]

I got my Entertainment Weekly in the mail today. Summer movie issue. It has this.

Surreal drive and Wallet 2.0

[migrated from myspace blog]

I drove from work at the base, today, to the mall to get some Chick-fil-A and Starbuck's as a late lunch. There seemed to be an inordinate number of odd sights along the way. A man riding his horse in the grass next to the road. Even stranger is that he had his dog with him, walking right next to the horse (if you know me, you probably know I would never have my dog next to a road without a leash on purpose.) Then a minute later there's a guy riding his bike on the road...wearing an acoustic guitar on his back. I'm sure he had some reason. Just weird. Then, at the Nutter Center, I passed something like 3 dozen marching bands in the parking lot warming up, setting up, getting ready for what had to be some sort of competition.

__

Star Wars USB flash drives

These are awesome. But they're too expensive for the amount of memory you get.

The Bourne Ultimatum

[migrated from myspace blog]

No lectures please about how the movies don't follow the books at all. I'm aware, I just don't care. I love this series. The summer of 2002 saw Damon out-acting Affleck to lead Bourne to a bigger box-office than The Sum of All Fears. (Well, let's face it, I could out-act Ben Affleck.) I got excited about The Bourne Identity something like a year and a half before it came out. I remember seeing 4 pieces of information on the internet that justified the excitement.

1. Doug Liman - Fresh off two little pictures by the titles "Swingers" and "Go", as director (btw, there's a Mr. and Mrs. Smith TV show in production?!)

2. Franka Potente - This was the first English-language film I'd become aware of her involvement with (Blow hadn't come out yet) since seeing her in Lola Rennt and Der Krieger und die Kaiserin.

3. Mr. Matt Damon Man - Okay, I wasn't really a fan yet (Bourne changed that), but I'd seen him in plenty of movies to know he could carry a film. Everything he's done since has just solidified his reputation as an actor even more than a movie star.

4. A single still from the film - This was actually probably the biggest source of excitement for me. If I remember it correctly, it was a movie still of Damon standing in a wide-open area in an obviously European city. (I wish I could find that still, but I've seen the movie so many times, I'm not sure I'd recognize it anymore.) It was and is that European-ness that pushed the first two films beyond most other spy thrillers. And not in a James Bond way with all the gadgets (this was before Casino Royale.) Bourne is a man alone, smarter than everyone around him, and capable of taking down anyone without raising his heart rate.

And so we come to the start of promotion for Ultimatum. Admittedly, I'm not thrilled that Paul Greengrass is returning instead of Doug Liman. The story and acting was great in Supremacy, but the car chase scenes were ridiculous in the fact that everything was shot in shaky handheld closeups so we can't even see what's going on. Doug Liman kept the camera back away from the car and let us see that it was all really happening there in front of us.

Film snobbery

[migrated from myspace blog]

I find it kind of funny that people seem to think it's impressive to lie about seeing certain movies, when, based on what they're lying about, they probably haven't even heard of the movies I'd be impressed by if they'd seen them. The segment of the article below calls these people "film bluffs", movies buffs pretending to be film buffs. I hardly think seeing The DaVinci Code qualifies anyone to be a film buff. Ron Howard and Tom Hanks. Aren't these the guys reponsible for bringing us Splash, not to mention Bosom Buddies and Happy Days?

Shouldn't they be at least lying about seeing movies by Kieslowski, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Antonioni, Bergman, Clouzot, Godard, Tarkovsky, Fellini, Kar Wai Wong, David Lean, even Gilliam, instead of Spielberg, Coppola, Darabont, and Jackson?

I have no problem admitting to liking Love, Actually (see below). Keira Knightley spends 10 minutes on screen and makes every man watching fall in love with her. The Colin Firth story is terrific. And this comes from someone who's cynical about love and romance.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article1647509.ece

Tom Beaumont-Griffin, the creator of myfilms.com, said: "Films are so much a part of our everyday conversation that it's no great surprise that we tend to bluff about what films we've seen to keep up with our colleagues, friends and family.

"The fact that we judge people on their film tastes is testament that films play such an important part in our lives on a daily basis.

"More and more people are conversing over the variety of films they have seen — not just the big summer blockbusters, but more quirky and offbeat films — to demonstrate their cultural prowess."

The survey was conducted by YouGov, which interviewed a representative sample of 2,489 people in February.

The films we wish we'd seen and the ones we did

Top five films to lie about seeing

1 Schindler's List

2 The Da Vinci Code

3 The Godfather

4 Apocalypse Now

5 Gone with the Wind

Top five films people like but dislike admitting to

1 The Sound Of Music

2 Ghost

3 Dirty Dancing

4 Love, Actually

5 Harry Potter

Top five "film-drops"

1 The Shawshank Redemption

2 The Green Mile

3 The Lord Of The Rings

4 The Godfather

5 Casino Royale