I went to see the movie Skyline yesterday.

I should have known better. The distributor has been advertising it like crazy, but as the release date approached, they didn’t preview it for movie critics. That usually means they’re trying to hide how much their movie sucks. And with a Metacritic score of 28 and 10% on the Tomatometer, the signs were not promising. Still, there was something about it…I wanted to see for myself. That turned out to be a mistake.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

[Read more…] about Skyline – Review

Well, the Academy Awards were last night, and I’m sure all the trendy ironic folks will be making the usual comments about Hollywood self-congratulation, but I mostly enjoyed it. I like movies, and I think good filmmaking deserves to be honored.

I do have one nit to pick, however, with the movie montage they showed as part of their salute to horror movies. Less than halfway through it, I noticed that they were showing a lot of scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. And then I noticed that they kept coming back to Psycho and The Exorcist and the Elm Street series and I started wondering… Was the Academy’s horror montage put together by people who didn’t really know much about horror films?

I think so. I’m hardly a scholar of horror films, and I haven’t gone over the montage in slow motion, so maybe a missed a few, but it seems like the anonymous editors of this montage certainly left out a lot of the horror genre.

To start with, the only zombies I saw were from maybe a one-second clip of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. There’s a huge sub-genre of zombie films that they completely missed. They didn’t even include Dawn of the Dead, or Return of the Living Dead or Re-Animator, let alone modern takes like 28 Days Later or Shaun of the Dead.

It’s a little shocking. I mean, I can understand how they might leave out horror specialist films like Videodrome or  C.H.U.D., but where were Scanners and Invasion of the Body Snatchers? How about The Thing? The Howling? The Dead Zone? Altered States? Any version of The Fly?

Where were Fright Night and Arachnophobia, and the Twilight Zone movie? What about Creepshow and Pumpkinhead and Near Dark? Where were Seven, and Final Destination, and The Lost Boys? Why didn’t we see any piece of the incredible Phantasm series?

It’s a truism that Hollywood has always slighted horror films, but last night they managed the amazing feat of slighting horror films in the middle of a montage honoring horror films…

And for fuck’s sake, how the hell do you leave out Evil Dead?

I saw Avatar yesterday, and it was a pretty darned good movie. If you think you might like this kind of thing, just go see it.

As with James Cameron’s earlier film Titanic, the star of this film is the magnificent setting and the way it is presented. The lush world of Pandora is beautiful, the CGI that creates the aliens is every bit as good as everyone else says, and the 3D unobtrusively helps you understand the the complex action in the forest scenery.

The characters and the plot are simple and relatively straightforward. For some reason, this bothers some people. They point to the thin characterization and simple plot as if it were some kind of terrible failing, and they’re proud of themselves for having seen past the special effects, which is a silly attitude. Seeing past the special effects in Avatar is like seeing past the songs in Rent.

Another thing that bothers some people about Avatar is the politics of it all. For example, here’s Peter Suderman at Reason’s Hit & Run blog:

And the Na’vi, the movie’s marble-skinned alien natives, are easily the most convincing humanoids ever to leap forth from a Hollywood effects house’s CGI server-farm — that is, at least in terms of the way they look and move. The realism stops, however, every time they open their mouths and reveal themselves to be crude, one-dimensional native stereotypes: instinctive and animalistic purveyors of cheap mysticism and nature worship. 

So despite its genuinely impressive technical innovations, Avatar isn’t much a movie: Instead, Cameron’s cooked up a derivative, overlong pastiche of anti-corporate clichés and quasi-mystical eco-nonsense. It’s not that the film’s politics make it bad, it’s that even if you agree, the nearly three-hour onslaught of simplistic moralizing leaves no room for interesting twists or ambiguity in the story or characters: corporations are bad, scientists are good, natives are pure, harmony with nature is the ultimate ideal…

Good grief. A “three-hour onslaught of simplistic moralizing”? There’s maybe three minutes of political content scattered throughout the whole movie. Admittedly, some of it is pretty clunky—references to pre-emptive strikes, shock and awe, and fighting terror with terror—but it all goes by in a few seconds. Maybe James Cameron was trying to send me a message, but so what? I was busy enjoying the rest of the movie.

I think Suderman must have gone into this movie with an attitude, because he sure missed a lot. For one thing, the native people’s connection to nature isn’t just some kind of “cheap mysticism” or “quasi-mystical eco-nonsense.” The Na’vi are connected to nature for a reason. Anybody who’s familiar with science fiction literature will see it coming, but it’s also spelled out quite clearly in the movie.

Also, Suderman and other right-wing critics seem to miss the rather important fact that the bad guys are stealing from the natives and destroying the places where they live, just like any corporation using eminent domain to take someone’s land. A libertarian shouldn’t have any problem with the natives trying to prevent that.

On the other hand, Roger Ebert says it has an anti-war message, apparently missing the fact that the Na’vi good guys have plenty of weapons and don’t mind fighting back.

I’m not saying Avatar is pro-war and pro-property rights, but neither is it about anti-corporate mystical eco-nonsense. It’s about these people on this planet, and some of them are human and some of them are alien, and…really, it’s a big special effects movie. Just go see it and have fun.

I hate it when movie theaters put a message on the screen where they threaten to prosecute us for using a recording device. I understand they want to prevent people from copying movies, and I don’t plan on any bootlegging, but I don’t like doing business with places that treat me like a criminal.

Since a taping incident doesn’t hurt a theater directly very much, I wondered if the message was just a requirement passed along from the distributor. Or were they really serious?

At the Muvico theater in Rosemont, Illinois, they’re apparently serious about it. Viciously and stupidly serious, as 22-year old Samantha Tumpach found out last weekend:

Taping three minutes of “Twilight: New Moon” during a visit to a Rosemont movie theater landed Samantha Tumpach in a jail cell for two nights.

Now, the 22-year-old Chicago woman faces up to three years in prison after being charged with a rarely invoked felony designed to prevent movie patrons from recording hot new movies and selling bootleg copies.

But Tumpach insisted Wednesday that’s not what she was doing — she was actually taping parts of her sister’s surprise birthday party celebrated at the Muvico Theater in Rosemont.

…

Managers contacted police, who examined the small digital camera, which also records video segments, Cmdr. Frank Siciliano said. Officers found that Tumpach had taped “two very short segments” of the movie — no more than four minutes total, he said.

Tumpach was arrested after theater managers insisted on pressing charges, he said.

I understand the need to protect intellectual property, but this is ridiculous. Copyright is usually a matter of civil law, so taking it to the level of felony criminal charges should only be necessary to punish blatant piracy of intellectual property such as a DVD forgery operation.

It’s also pretty asinine of the theater management to press charges in a case like this. I’m guessing that Ms Tumpach and her friends won’t spending any more money at Muvico in Rosemont. Neither will lots of other people If this story gets around.

FYI, here’s the Muvico contact page.

(Hat tip: Consumerist via Balko)

Update: Here’s my email to Muvico:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I’ve always been disturbed by the now-common warnings against using a recording device in theaters. I understand why recording is wrong, but I don’t appreciate spending good money in your establishment for tickets and snacks, and then being treated like a potential criminal.

Now I read in the Chicago Sun-Times that the Muvico I go to in Rosemont is pressing charges against a young lady for recording  a few minutes of the latest Twilight movie while playing around with a cheap little camera. That’s just crazy. Your theater manager has no sense of proportion—What’s next? Prosecuting customers for littering if they don’t throw away their empty popcorn buckets?

I guess he (or she) also has no sense of the value of customers to the theater business. There are lots of other theater choices in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. I don’t have to go to Muvico, and I don’t think I will.

— Mark Draughn

Hey Guys! Somebody cast Megan Fox as a sexually seductive teenage killer creature thingy in a movie called Jennifer’s Body. It’s rated R, so there may be titties!