7 posts tagged “movies”

So I'm sitting here at Stately Dabysan-and-CarrieNation Manor watching Rocky III for the 112th time, and I got to thinking about the lost art of the movie montage. It helps that Rocky III contains not only one, but two of the very best montages of all times: the first featuring Mr. T running laps, lifting weights and punching bunnies as Rocky gets soft living the good life; and the second featuring the most homoerotic training sequence of all time as Apollo teaches Rock how to "use muscles he never thought he had."

Of course, this exercise sounded like a much better idea before I had to do the work of remembering enough montages to make an actual list. So let's go ahead and do this starting at the beginning, since I really only care about #1.

1) The Karate Kid - You're The Best Around. I challenge anyone to watch this montage and not get a chill. The music, sequence, and dramatic tension are all perfect. All other montages wish they could live up to the genius of this perfect sequence.

CarrieNation and I took a few hours out of this truly glorious spring afternoon to watch the new Star Trek movie in Imax, and you can tell by the headline CarrieNation offered that she didn't enjoy the film as much as I did. To be fair, I think she would have enjoyed it more were it not for all the spontaneous bursts of applause that followed every inside Star Trek joke. Still, a ripping good summer blockbuster if you ask me. I'll give it four-and-a-half Dabysans. Check it out.

On a minor side note, Imax is not what it used to be. I used to remember Imax movies taking place in giant, vertigo inducing theaters. Now "Imax" apparently means "slightly larger than normal screen." So it goes.

I'm a little bit low on ideas today. Let's blame the lingering head cold that laid me low this week. I could re-purpose some old crap or a Facebook meme, but I don't want to be a lame ass. So I fall back on that last refuge of bloggers and cretins -- a best-of list.

I love bad guys. I have been known to root for them to vanquish their vanilla hero counterparts. The bad guy is everything in an action movie. He (or she) creates the dramatic tension and establishes a sense of urgency. Crappy villains make for crappy movies. On the flip side, a good villain can dignify an otherwise silly movie, as was the case with Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber in "Die Hard."

A couple years back, AFI posted its list of best movie heros and villains, but it sucked. If you want to know how much it sucked, it had Hannibal Lecter atop the "villains" column, despite the fact that he wasn't the ...um... villain in the movie for which he is most famous. The AFI list was also too long, so here, without further ado, is the definitive list of the five best movie villains of all time, as I thought of them, just now.

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5) Auric Goldfinger - Goldfinger: Goldfinger is the least charismatic bad guy on this short list, and is serving as a bit of a composite for all of the excellent villains provided by the James Bond franchise. Goldfinger is the best of all the Bond movies (fact) and is due in no small part to having an excellent villain. He is also responsible for one of the great movie villain lines of all time. Enjoy.

I've got a date with the accountant today to see how much I get to contribute to the AIG bonus package, so I'll fulfill by blogligations today by offering this clip of Dennis Farina's finest moments from Midnight Run, perhaps the most under-appreciated comedy of all time.

I just watched a great movie. My girlfriend kinda forced me to watch it, but it ended up being super.

It was about a lot of things: an international city; career women relying on each other to get through tough times; and the distant, flawed men they love. It had everything you'd want -- fashionable clothes, relationship drama, lots of casual drinking. There was a really interesting subplot about the women deciding if they wanted to stay in the city, where things were really blowing up, or move to a safer spot in the country.

And how could anyone keep a dry eye as the plucky central heroine wrestled with her decision to stand beside her hard, distant, but interesting man, or go with a safer choice, away from the crossfire.

But mostly it was about female friendships.

By now, of course, you know I'm talking about "Downfall: The End of Hitler and the Third Reich." It's as good a thing as any to watch when you're hiding indoors and staying away from insipid, classist, consumerist drivel like "Sex in the City." 

So the other night, when Hotrod almost got his ass kicked by an excitable indie pop fan at the Polyphonic Spree show, it reminded me of my favorite movie sub-genre -- the tough guy picture.

As an adult with an education, and a job, and a cursory understanding of the criminal code, conflicts with strangers -- especially those with the same set of socializing influences -- are a strange affair. On the one hand, I'm not going to back down from some pencil-necked CPA with road rage, but on the other, we both know that it would take an awful lot of convincing to get either of us to do anything that could land us in a prison or a hospital, or a prison hospital. So there's a lot of puffing and preening and empty threats, and both parties leave the experience wondering if they just won or lost. Most unsettling.

Which brings us to the tough guy picture. Tough guy pictures can masquerade as a lot of different types of film, but at their core they feature protagonists who enjoy absolute clarity about how to respond to threats, real or imagined. These are not fellows who stay up nights thinking up clever retorts to arguments that ended hours ago (jerkstore!). They are men of action, of a sort that don't actually exist, outside of prisons, or hospitals or prison hospitals.

My all time favorite tough guy pictures are the three films made by Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone. The scene below pretty much encapsulates how I'd like to deal with people who laugh at my mule.

My new favorite movie tough guy is International-Action-Superstar Tony Jaa, who doesn't take kindly to westerners stealing his town's stone Buddha or prized elephants, or anything really.

I want to go on record now by saying that I will officially become a NASCAR fan the day they field a Perrier car driven by a gay, French existentialist. 

Although this probably means I won't be watching dudes drive in circles anytime soon, the brilliant minds behind the excellent Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby have shown us all how such an addition would improve the dubious "sport" of professional stock car racing.  

Ricky bobby

The plot, such as it is, centers around Will Ferrell's Ricky Bobby, a developmentally disabled man-child with a savant's gift for driving very fast. Aided by his best friend and intellectual equal, Cal Naughton, Jr. (played with doughy earnestness by John C. Reliy) Bobby rises from the pit crew of an unheralded NASCAR team to become the most popular driver on the circuit, thanks to his penchant for either winning races, or crashing spectacularly in the attempt. All is going swimmingly until his team owner, played by Greg Germann, orchestrates Bobby's downfall by calling on European driving phenom-cum-Camus aficionado Jean Girard to defeat Bobby and send him into a career-threatening tailspin. Girard is played by Sacha Baron Cohen, the man better known as Ali G. And that's pretty much it. I won't spoil the movie by saying where things go from there, but if you can't figure it out, you may have a career in NASCAR.

Will Ferrell may be the most naturally funny comic actor of our time. He's made some stinkers, and other actors have turned in better performances, but nobody working in mainstream cinema today is more innately hilarious. He makes the movie. Ferrell is scarily believable as the hick doofus who has managed to bumble his way into a million dollar McMansion, surrounded by his cars, kids (Walker and Texas Ranger) and trophy wife (Leslie Bibb). The film's funniest scene comes when the Family Bobby sits down to a meal consisting of selections from Dominos pizza, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell. Bobby says a rambling grace to Baby Jesus, and each time his wife and father-in-law interrupt him to inform him that Jesus actually died as an adult, Bobby ladles it on thicker: "little eight pound, six ounce baby Jesus, with his fleece diapers..." The high point of the scene comes when Bobby's wife informs her father that if they "wanted (their kids) to be wussies, they would have called them Dr. Quinn and Medicine Woman."

This may be Ferrell's best movie to date. Like all movies from Saturday Night Live alums, it comes off a bit like an extended improv sketch, and loses momentum at times, but the pacing is pretty solid and the next good gag is always around the corner. Three-and-a-half stars. Check it out.