Here’s a great review of WALL-E from a United Methodist web site. An excerpt:
Where the movie really shines—and where it is most daring—is in the two leads. Most of Wall•E is completely free of dialogue, leaving the robots and others to express themselves entirely in body language. Wall•E, a perpetual klutz, comes to resemble the lovable losers of the silent-film era.
I’m watching a real curiosity: “Good Times.” No, not the mid-70s sitcom with Jimmie Walker, but a 1967 movie starring Sonny and Cher. I thought I’d blogged about it before, but a keyword search for “Sonny” turned up nothing, and I don’t seem to be shy about repeating myself anyway. (I first tried a keyword search for “Cher,” but that turned up posts about everything from Phil Vischer to the Schermerhorn Symphony Center.)
The plot of the movie (and “plot” is overstating it a bit) is that Sonny and Cher, playing themselves, are having angst over whether or not to appear in a movie. Sonny has gotten them into an ill-advised contract with Mordicus, a vaguely-malevolent movie producer played by George Sanders. They’ve either got to come up with their own idea for a movie or they will be forced to appear in a hack script, which they hate, by one of Mordicus’ associates. The movie is mostly a series of tongue-in-cheek fantasy sequences as Sonny and / or Cher imagine different movie genres in which they might appear — western, private eye, Tarzan, et cetera. Most of the sequences are built around musical numbers.
As a movie, it’s sort of cheesy, but considered as a series of music videos, it’s a great period piece. The songs are terrific. It was the directoral debut for William Friedkin, who went on to more serious work in “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist.”
| Title | Content |
|---|---|
| Movie: | Good Times |
| Director: | William Friedkin |
| Release Date: | May 1967 (USA) / Other Countries |
| Genre: | Comedy | Musical |
| Tagline: | Sonny & Cher's ONLY motion picture together! |
| User Rating: | 149 votes, average 4.5 out of 10 |
| Runtime: | 91 min |
| Cast: | ... |
| Others: |
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| Photos: | N/A |
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I know some mashups can be kind of lame, but I thought this one — which I saw on the Mental_Floss blog — was both funny and well-executed.
It’s the law of averages; one of these days, the folks at Pixar Animation Studios are going to fire a dud. Maybe it will be a first-class stinker; maybe it will just cause people to shrug and say “that’s not up to their usual standard.”
Whenever that may happen, it did not happen in 2008.
WALL-E is great. Just great.
A few advance reviews accused it of being a heavy-handed “message movie,” and maybe even a political polemic. Balderdash. It’s certainly no more of a message movie than “Ratatouille,” and — like “Ratatouille” — it is entertainment first, parable second. For one thing, the cartoonishness of its apocalypse is self-deprecating; it both makes its point and mocks itself for having a point. There’s a major vein of science fiction that has some sort of apocalyptic, look-what-we-did-to-ourselves slant. At its best, it can be poignant; even at its worst, it can be overlooked if the story and characters are good enough.
“WALL-E” goes way beyond good enough. It’s beautiful, and thrilling, and fun. See it as soon as possible.
The short subject, “Presto,” is terrific as well, just as we’ve all come to expect from Pixar.
By the way, I was shocked to see a teaser trailer for “Pink Panther 2″ in which Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau tries to weasel his way in to a screening of … “WALL-E.” “Pink Panther 2″ is from MGM; “WALL-E,” of course, is Disney/Pixar. Why would one studio want to promote the other’s product? I’d read in advance that “WALL-E” incorporates some live-action clips from a well-known movie musical, and so I thought maybe this was some sort of quid-pro-quo in return for MGM giving Disney permission to use the clip.
But I looked it up just now, and the musical in question was produced by 20th Century Fox. MGM had nothing to do with it. So there must be some other explanation.
There aren’t many people who could be interviewed by both Christianity Today and the Onion AV Club and sound completely at home in either place.
I may have to go see Wall*E tomorrow night.
One of my all-time favorite movies, “A Face In The Crowd,” will air Saturday night on TCM as part of “The Essentials,” hosted by Robert Osborne & Rose McGowan.
I’ve blogged about it countless times before, but if you haven’t seen it, you need to see it. It’s probably more relevant today than when it came out in 1957. It’s about the corrosive power of fame, especially as it relates to the immediacy of television, as an Arkansas vagrant is turned into a superstar and then begins to believe he can tell his fans what to buy — and, ultimately, whom to elect. Andy Griffith plays the vagrant, Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, with Patricia Neal as Marcia Jeffries, the Doctor Frankenstein who discovers and promotes him, only to realize too late what a monster she has created. Walter Matthau plays Mel, the voice of conscience, who also carries a torch for Marcia in the same way she carries one for Lonesome Rhodes.
If you somehow haven’t seen it, set your VCR or TiVo now. It’s worthy of being called “Essential.”
| Title | Content |
|---|---|
| Movie: | A Face in the Crowd |
| Director: | Elia Kazan |
| Release Date: | 17 October 1957 (Sweden) / Other Countries |
| Genre: | Drama |
| User Rating: | 2,991 votes, average 8.1 out of 10 |
| Runtime: | 125 min |
| Awards: | 1 nomination |
| Cast: | ... |
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| Photos: | N/A |
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I got away from work unusually early today because of some stuff I’m going to have to do tomorrow. I told my co-workers I was thinking of going to see the 4 p.m. matinee of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” in Tullahoma, down the road. (It’s also showing here in Shelbyville, but they don’t have weekday matinees.)
But when I left work, it was too early to go to Tullahoma. I came home, sprawled out on the couch, and dozed lightly off, until just a little too late to make it to the movie.
I’ll see it eventually.
One of my favorite movies will air on TCM a little later today, as part of their Memorial Day weekend marathon of war movies. The movie will air while I’m at work, although it doesn’t matter because I have the DVD.
“Where Eagles Dare” is a crackerjack (but not very realistic) spy thriller starring the unlikely duo of Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. Many of you have seen it before — there was a period when TBS and TNT ran it quite regularly — but if you haven’t, you need to. As I said, you may need to suspend disbelief from time to time, but the action (after a slow first half-hour) is thrilling, the plot (by Alistair MacLean, who wrote an original screenplay because he had no more novels for the producers to adapt) has various surprises up its sleeve, and Burton and Eastwood make a shockingly effective team. Great fun.
(The post title comes from Eastwood’s last line; he tells someone, in effect, not to call him the next time such a dangerous mission comes up.)
| Title | Content |
|---|---|
| Movie: | Where Eagles Dare |
| Director: | Brian G. Hutton |
| Release Date: | 12 March 1969 (USA) / Other Countries |
| Genre: | Action | Adventure | Drama | War |
| Tagline: | They look like Nazis but . . . The Major is British . . . The Lieutenant is American . . . The Beautiful Frauleins are Allied Agents! |
| User Rating: | 10,982 votes, average 7.7 out of 10 |
| Runtime: | 158 min |
| Awards: | 2 nominations |
| Cast: | ... |
| Others: |
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| Photos: | N/A |
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I thoroughly enjoyed the movie “Secondhand Lions” the first time I saw it. I would love to do a big long essay some time comparing the movie with “Big Fish,” another movie released the same year which has an interestingly-similar premise but a quite different tone and resolution.
Anyway, I knew from reading IMDb that the ending I’d seen was not the original, and that the ending was re-shot and changed after preview screenings of the movie. I also knew that the DVD contained the original ending as a bonus “alternate scene.”
I will explain this without spoilers, although it will be difficult. On one hand, I tend to be skeptical of art-by-committee and I was afraid that perhaps the original ending reached a different conclusion about the characters and their motivations. From an artistic standpoint, I worried that the filmmakers had somehow made their ending happier or more sentimental purely for the sake of marketing.
Then again, I like the warm-hearted, feel-good ending which the film ended up with. The movie has a theme related to faith, and about what we choose to believe in. I was afraid that if the original ending was less sentimental, it might also have carried a different message about the importance and value of faith.
Well, I saw the movie in the bargain bin at Wal-Mart last week, and finally got around to seeing the alternate ending for myself.
I am happy to report that the filmmakers were on the side of the angels when they reshot the ending. The change was not made in order to over-sentimentalize the movie; if anything, the original ending was sappier than the final version. It was also slower and clumsier than the final version. The changes made by the filmmakers didn’t change the message of the movie at all; they simply punched up the ending, making it more entertaining by wrapping up the story in a different way. The basic conclusion, in terms of the moral of the story, is the same in both versions.
I do, actually, have a little tickle of reluctance about one aspect of the movie’s premise. The movie stresses the value of believing in something, but at one point one of the characters tells another that it doesn’t matter in what you believe as long as you believe in something. In its most literal sense, of course, I reject that statement. I am not a universalist. I think that it does matter in what you believe. But the movie can also be taken as a parable for the need to believe in something before you have evidence of it — to take a leap of faith.
Happily, that parable applies just as well to either of the movie’s endings.
| Title | Content |
|---|---|
| Movie: | Secondhand Lions |
| Director: | Tim McCanlies |
| Release Date: | 19 September 2003 (USA) / Other Countries |
| Genre: | Adventure | Comedy | Drama | Family | Romance |
| User Rating: | 13,218 votes, average 7.5 out of 10 |
| Runtime: | 111 min | USA:109 min | Argentina:120 min |
| Awards: | 5 nominations |
| Cast: | Michael Caine, Robert Duvall, Haley Joel Osment, Kyra Sedgwick ... |
| Others: |
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| Photos: | N/A |
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Here’s a fascinating profile of Phillip Anschutz, the man behind Walden Media and films like the “Narnia” series and “Bridge to Terabithia.”
My co-worker Brian Mosely has a great post at the Times-Gazette site about a Charlton Heston movie you didn’t hear mentioned when Heston passed away — and which, Brian says, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas specifically don’t want you to know about.
I have a quite unusual movie on the TV this evening; unfortunately, I’ve been busy with a million little things and haven’t been able to pay it the attention it deserves.
It’s a curiosity of which I wasn’t even aware: “The Yellow Rolls-Royce.”
Here are some of the names in the cast, and see if you can imagine them all in the same movie: Rex Harrison, Shirley MacLaine, George C. Scott, Ingrid Bergman, Omar Sharif, Art Carney (no relation) and Wally Cox (the voice of the original Underdog!).
The way they all fit is that it’s actually an anthology: three mini-movies in one, taking place over several decades, with the car as the one thing connecting them as it passes from owner to owner.
I’ll have to give this a closer look the next time it airs.
| Title | Content |
|---|---|
| Movie: | The Yellow Rolls-Royce |
| Director: | Anthony Asquith |
| Release Date: | 13 May 1965 (USA) / Other Countries |
| Genre: | Drama / Romance / Comedy |
| Tagline: | Everything Happens In The Yellow Rolls Royce! |
| User Rating: | 735 votes, average 6.2 out of 10 |
| Runtime: | 122 min |
| Awards: | Won Golden Globe. Another 3 nominations |
| Cast: | Ingrid Bergman, Rex Harrison, Shirley MacLaine, George C. Scott ... |
| Others: |
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| Photos: | N/A |
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I have a banquet to cover tomorrow night, but I will have to set my VCR. Turner Classic Movies is starting a new interview series, “Role Model,” in which one successful actor interviews another whom he/she admires. Tomorrow, Alec Baldwin will interview Gene Wilder, followed by un-cut, commercial-free airings of “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles.”
| Title | Content |
|---|---|
| Movie: | The Producers |
| Director: | Mel Brooks |
| Release Date: | 10 November 1968 (USA) / Other Countries |
| Genre: | Comedy |
| Tagline: | Hollywood Never Faced a Zanier Zero Hour! |
| Plot Outline: | Producers Max Bialystock (Mostel) and Leo Bloom (Wilder) make money by producing a sure-fire flop. |
| User Rating: | 14,781 votes, average 7.7 out of 10 |
| Runtime: | 88 min |
| Awards: | Won Oscar. Another 2 wins&5 nominations |
| Cast: | ... |
| Others: |
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| Photos: | N/A |
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I don’t like the dig at Audrey Geisel, who I found delightful when I met her last year, but I definitely share the basic sentiment of this:
Often, when watching a movie on TV, I’ll look up the movie on IMDb, and that’s what I did tonight during ABC’s annual Easter airing of “The Ten Commandments.”
This story on the trivia page was so funny I had to pass it along:
According to Hollywood lore, while filming the orgy sequence which precedes Moses’ descent from Mount Horab with the Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille was perched on top of a ladder delivering his customarily long-winded directions through a megaphone to the hundreds of extras involved in the scene. After droning on to the extras for several minutes, DeMille was distracted by one young woman who was persistently talking to the woman standing next to her.
DeMille stopped his speech and addressed everyone’s attention to the young woman. “Here,” DeMille said, “We have a young woman whose conversation with her friend is apparently more important than listening to her instructions from her director while we are all engaged in making motion picture history. Perhaps the young woman would care to enlighten us all, and tell us what the devil is so important that it cannot wait until after we make this shot.”
After a moment of awkward silence, the young woman spoke up and boldly confessed, “I was just saying to my friend, ‘I wonder when that bald-headed old fart is gonna call ‘Lunch!’”
DeMille stared at the woman for a moment, paused, then lifted his megaphone and shouted, “Lunch!”
| Title | Content |
|---|---|
| Movie: | The Ten Commandments |
| Director: | Cecil B. DeMille |
| Release Date: | 5 October 1956 (USA) / Other Countries |
| Genre: | Adventure / Drama |
| Tagline: | The Greatest Event in Motion Picture History |
| Plot Outline: | The Egyptian Prince, Moses, learns of his true heritage as a Hebrew and his divine mission as the deliverer of his people. |
| User Rating: | 14,800 votes, average 7.9 out of 10 |
| Runtime: | 220 min |
| Awards: | Won Oscar. Another 3 wins&7 nominations |
| Cast: | Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, Edward G. Robinson ... |
| Others: |
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| Photos: | N/A |
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Soapstone is a novel, a work of fiction, inspired in part by my short-term mission experiences. You can find it at my e-store, at Amazon.com
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My Times-Gazette blog
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