Cartoon musicals at the Walter Reade Theater this month. This looks like an amazing program. LOTS of great stuff. Also Red vs Blue on the big screen. Very cool.
Category: movies
The Aristocrats
I have to admit I’m curious about this movie. Maybe I can talk someone into going to see it with me this weekend.
Star Wars
I went to see Revenge of the Sith yesterday morning. I couldn’t quite bring myself to go to the midnight showing Wednesday night. I’m just getting too old for that. I did enjoy the movie, and it was a good crowd. I went to the Ziegfeld in NYC. Lots of enthusiastic folks in costume, kids with toy lightsabers, and the usual contingent of NYC weirdos.
Dreamworks Animation
I went to a Dreamworks Animation presentation in NYC today. It was pretty impressive: lots of celebrities, lots of clips, lots of fun. It was hosted by Al Roker. They brought in Jerry Seinfeld, Mike Myers, Chris Rock, and Justin Timberlake, among others. Seinfeld is working on a movie about bees. Chris Rock is in Madagascar. And of course Mike Myers is working on the next Shrek movie. Unfortunately, so is Justin Timberlake — he’s going to play King Arthur. That might not turn out to be as bad as it sounds. We’ll see.
We also got to see Nick Park and some stuff from the upcoming Wallace and Gromit movie. It looks to be at least as good as the various shorts. We also got to see some stuff from Aardman’s first computer-animated movie. They didn’t show much, but it looked interesting. The style is similar to W&G, just done in computer animation instead of clay.
I still like Pixar a lot more than Dreamworks, but hey, they’re trying. And anyone who’ll pay for a W&G movie can’t be all bad.
Oh, and through what I can only imagine was a clerical error, we ended up in the second row. So I could see right up Chris Rock’s nose. Cool.
Animation Now
I just bought tickets for this. It should be fun, even if a lot of the Dreamworks stuff isn’t that great. I’m definitely interested in whatever Wallace & Gromit stuff they’ve got ready.
Cinema Treasures
I found this nice page on old movie theaters while looking for movie showtimes this morning.
Lord of the Rings
Here’s a strange idea I just had: spend the rest of the day watching the LoTR extended edition DVDs. If I start now, I’ll be done right around 1am. I’m not sure I can sit on the couch that long, though.
The Best Films of the Year
It’s nice to see that Tokyo Godfathers made A.O. Scott’s Best Films of the Year list. It’s probably my favorite film of the year, although I think I first saw it in 2003.
The Polar Express
I’ve been seeing very mixed reviews for this movie. I’m really scratching my head over this bit from the New York Times review:
Tots surely won’t recognize that Santa’s big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler’s Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will.” But their parents may marvel that when Santa’s big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.
Bizarre. Can’t anybody just watch a movie these days without thinking about Hitler and scrotums? There are a few good points in the review about the limitations of the motion-capture techniques used in the film. From what I’ve seen, I would agree that the characters look unnatural and a little creepy. Roger Ebert, on the other hand, loved it:
“The Polar Express” is a movie for more than one season; it will become a perennial, shared by the generations. It has a haunting, magical quality because it has imagined its world freshly and played true to it, sidestepping all the tiresome Christmas cliches that children have inflicted on them this time of year.
One reviewer’s “creepy” is another’s “haunting and magical”, I guess. I may have to go and see it, out of curiosity, if nothing else.
Bryant Park
Anybody want to go see Planet of the Apes in Bryant Park next week?