For reals, a movie based on Tetris. Because it’s something people have heard of, and therefore executives want to make it into a movie, even though there’s no plot whatsoever. This is literally the example I give for the worst idea for a movie imaginable. (Sometimes I up the joke to “Cap’n Crunch vs. Tetris.”)
But at least Tetris (the game) is somewhat fun, which can’t be said for:
A couple notes on this. The Accountant isn’t actually about accounting, which would be absurdly boring. (My day-job is as an accountant.) It’s about an accountant who moonlights as an assassin, which sounds like it could be a reasonable movie. I just think it’s silly that there’s a movie called “The Accountant.”
Regarding Tetris, the press release does note that “No cast, crew, production date, or release date have been determined. No writer has been named.” Movies in that stage are entirely imaginary, and something less than 10% of movies in pre-production actually make it to release. However, actual money has changed hands for the movie rights to Tetris, which is flat-out ridiculous.
I started to watch the first episode of Utopia, only to discover that it primarily consists of unpleasant people screaming at each other. I turned it off after half an hour.
But it occurs to me, unpleasant people screaming at each other is also a perfectly apt description of real politics. Only in real politics, when a bunch of obnoxious jerks band together to force their will on a different bunch of obnoxious jerks that are slightly fewer in number, it has an actual impact on our lives.
Just a thought.
(My apologies for this post being a week late. I’ve been too busy with that life stuff to blog.)
My blogging has been light recently. I’m switching day-jobs, and have been busy wrapping things up on my old one. Blogging will most likely continue to be light until I get up to speed on the new job.
A list of movies you’ve heard of that are new on Netflix in September is below. But first, here are my recommendations:
Anaconda: One of those movies that’s so bad its good.
Arachnophobia: Not a great movie, but it’s some solid cheesy fun.
Braveheart: A solid, epic action movie, from back in the 90s when they made action movies with depth that could be critically acclaimed and win Oscars.
Also worth noting:
Chinatown: A noir classic that I personally find too incoherent to work, but a lot of other people love.
Good Morning, Vietnam: If you’re still depressed over Robin Williams’s suicide, this might be a good one to rewatch. Has some of the best ad-libbing of all time. I personally am not a fan of everything in the movie other than Robin Williams riffing. Although this is the reason why I always think of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” as a sarcastic song about grisly death.
Complete List
Movies
A Price Above Rubies
A Simple Plan
Across the Universe
Addams Family Values
Alfie
An Officer and a Gentleman
Anaconda
Anastasia
Arachnophobia
Are We Done Yet
Bounce
Braveheart
Brian’s Song
Chinatown
Cool Runnings
Coyote Ugly
Crocodile Dundee
Days of Thunder
Deep Blue
Defiance
Elizabethtown
Flubber
Good Morning, Vietnam
Guess Who
Hoodwinked
Jay and Sielnt Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie
Lords of Dogtown
School of Rock
Swiss Family Robinson
The Blue Lagoon
Silver Linings Playbook (Sept. 16)
3 Days to Kill (Sept. 17)
Bad Grandpa (Sept. 27)
TV
Californication
Doomsday Preppers
The Blacklist Season 1 (Sept. 7)
Trailer Park Boys Season 8 (Sept. 5)
The League Season 5 (Sept. 2)
About a Boy Season 1 (Sept. 14)
Arrow Season 2 (Sept. 14)
Bones Season 9 (Sept. 16)
New Girl Season 3 (Sept. 16)
The Fosters Season 2 (Sept. 17)
Revolution Season 2 (Sept. 22)
How I Met Your Mother (Sept. 26)
Parks and Recreation Season 5 (Sept. 26)
Comic Book Men Season 3 (Sept. 28)
The Walking Dead Season 4 (Sept. 29)
The Lego Movie was created because people had a good story to tell. Starting with a good story, it’s not surprising that we ended up with a good movie. (Not that every attempt at telling a good story works out, but it is generally a necessary precondition.)
Whereas Battleship was just a cynical cash grab. Some studio executive looked at a list of old toys and board games, picked out some that he thought people had heard of, and then decided to buy the rights and make movies out of them. There was zero thought given to whether these would make good stories, or even if it was possible to make a story out of them at all. It was just “People have heard of this, therefore [I hope] they’ll show up in theaters to see a movie version.” As I recall, the same deal included the rights to make Monopoly, Stretch Armstrong, and Ouija Board movies. (Though I’m going by memory of an article I read like 7 years ago, so I could be mistaken. Also, I have to admit that I can imagine a decent Ouija Board movie.)
Consider this: Milton Bradley does not own the concept of battleships. They own the trademark for a board game called Battleship, and the patent to those game mechanics. But that intellectual property doesn’t extend to film. Any studio that wanted to could have made a movie about a battleship, and probably even called it “Battleship,” without paying Milton Bradley a cent.
The only reason that the studio bought the the completely unnecessary rights to a game with no plot was to allow them the opportunity to lie that the eventual movie would have some connection to something people have vague affection for. And telling that lie to the audience was the entire purpose of the movie.
All that was left to do was slap together a script that was just a means to get to ships firing guns, explosions, and someone saying “You sank my battleship.” And when that wasn’t enough to reach their desired run time, pad that with more random action scenes like fist-fights and an alien in an exoskeleton.
Then the producers figured that they could just sit back and wait for all the people who played the board game as a kid to show up in the theaters.
But that didn’t work out for them. I suppose we should be a bit thankful, as this whole exercise finally disproved the famous HL Mencken quote, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” So there’s that.
I thought this video from Every Frame a Painting was pretty interesting. It traces the development of how films/TV handle texting and the internet on screen.
For those of you too lazy to watch the video, it concludes that for texting, the best solution is simply showing text onscreen, with no speech bubbles or cutaways. It lets you keep watching the actors’ performances while inferring who is texting whom, which keeps the viewer engaged. This was first popularized in BBC’s Sherlock in 2010, but has been used a lot since then.
The video argues that nobody has yet come up with a good way to show internet usage, and that’s something that filmmakers still need to innovate on in order to find a solution.
This article makes a point that I frequently make. If you pay attention to what you eat, it’s very easy to eat healthily at fast food restaurants. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that fast food chains offer the easiest way to be healthy.
This is why I think that food snobs/health snobs/class snobs that look down on fast food are way off-base.
There are healthier options that exist. But they’ll all take a lot more effort and expense. And of course fast food chains also make it easy to be extremely unhealthy if you don’t pay attention to what you eat.
Note: The second half of this article gets a lot more political than something I’d usually link to in this blog. Feel free to ignore that if politics aren’t your thing. Also, please don’t comment on the political stuff here. If you’re interested in getting into a flamewar about WalMart, there are countless other places on the Internet where you can do that.
A list of movies you’ve heard of that are new on Netflix in August is below. But first, here are my recommendations:
Chocolat: One of those feel-good movies that celebrates life and can’t help but bring a smile to your face.
Cosmos (2014 Miniseries): Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s update on the classic Carl Sagan series. Explains the current state of cosmology in an engaging way, by wrapping up the science in compelling stories about people.
Face/Off: One of the most ridiculous over-the-top movies ever made. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but if you’re pointing out logic problems in a movie where a super-cop and super-criminal literally swap faces and proceed to kill/exploder everyone and everything, you’ve kind of missed the point. If you enjoy dumb action, this movie is a lot of fun.
Rounders: One of those movies that failed in theaters but found a cult following on video. Follows the adventures of an underground poker player, and does an excellent job of making poker compelling. Quite a few real-life poker pros were inspired to get into poker because of this movie.
Rocky: The classic American underdog story. A bit slow for modern audiences, but an excellent story of a man proving his self-worth through sheer determination.
(For an explanation of this, read the Introduction. Other posts in this series can be found here.)
Movies We Still Care About
Batman
Field of Dreams
Heathers
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
The Little Mermaid
Say Anything
When Harry Met Sally
Other Fond Memories
Dead Poets Society
Steel Magnolias
Other Notable Movies
The Abyss
UHF
Best Picture Nominees:
Driving Miss Daisy (Winner)
Born on the Fourth of July
Dead Poets Society
Field of Dreams
My Left Foot
Top Grossing Films (US)
Batman
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Lethal Weapon 2
Look Who’s Talking
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
Back to the Future 2
Ghostbusters 2
Driving Miss Daisy
Parenthood
Dead Poets Society
Rotten Tomatoes Top Movies
Sex, Lies, and Videotape (98%)
Say Anything (98%)
Do the Right Thing (96%)
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (94%)
The Little Mermaid (92%)
Parenthood (92%)
Glory (93%)
Crimes and Misdemeanors (93%)
Movies We Still Care About
The Little Mermaid
This started Disney’s string of brilliant animation that continued into the early-mid 90s, which in my opinion was far superior in quality to the classic Disney animation like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. It combines a rich visual style with engaging story, humor, and amazingly catchy songs. I bet to this day you can still hear in your mind Under the Sea, Part of Their World, and Kiss the Girl.
And just in case you can’t, here they are.
As a more modern audience, we can look down on this film for its anti-feminist message of the heroine giving up her identity in pursuit of a man. It is a product of its time in that respect, and I can certainly see why parents might want to exercise caution before showing this to children of an impressionable age.
But on the other hand, that crab is hilarious.
Side note: Once when I was in college, I went with a friend to see the movie Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. But it was sold out, so instead we saw the re-release of Little Mermaid. True story.
Say Anything
There’s this scene:
When Harry Met Sally
Widely considered one of the best romantic comedies of all time. It redefined the genre and was innovative for the way that it told a story spanning decades. And as someone who also fell in love with and married my best friend, I can certainly appreciate this.
But I know you’re all just waiting for me to embed the orgasm scene.
Other Notable Films
The Abyss
I had a professor in film school that argued that the best big movies were those that were really a small movie in disguise. (And this professor knew what he was talking about, seeing as he wrote a small movie called Top Gun.) The Abyss is a perfect example of this. It’s a simple story of a man reconnecting with his ex-wife whom he still loves, set in the backdrop of trying to protect aliens from a nuclear bomb at the bottom of the ocean.
It largely gets overshadowed by James Cameron’s other work, but it’s an excellent movie in its own right and well worth revisiting. (Make sure you watch the extended edition. The theatrical version hacked out a bunch of important story elements and ended up not making much sense, which is part of the reason why this movie isn’t as remembered as it should be.)
It also had some ground-breaking special effects for the time, which Cameron would re-use to great effect two years later in Terminator 2.
UHF
As I write this Weird Al is more relevant than ever, having the number one album in America. (The first comedy album to reach #1 since JFK was President.) Twenty-five years ago he released this bizarre but hilarious movie. It bombed at the box office, but has continued to hold a cult status among nerds. And its theme of an imaginative outcast who sees the world differently achieving greatness through his unique vision continues to resonate. Plus it manages to spoof deep cable reality shows long before those shows even existed. (And check out a pre-Seinfeld, pre-racist rant Michael Richards playing a delightfully weird character.)
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Do you disagree with any of these choices, or think that I missed something? Leave a comment below.
Cinema Badger 