25 August 2000

This movie is described as a semi-autobiographical look at the writer-director’s adolescent boyhood in Beirut split by civil war starting in 1975. Although the characters say Super 8 and a cartridge of Super 8 film is actually seen on screen, the actual camera is clearly of an earlier technology. The producers are very bold to try to evoke the city of 20 years ago, and only the occasional Chevrolet Celebrity in the background gives it away. (The makers of Music of the Heart chickened out and avoided the trouble and expense of recreating the New York City of 1979 by moving the central character’s story up 10 years.)

111 minutes.

I saw trailers for this all summer and (like happened with The Next Karate Kid) I could not resist. I was distracted from the world of this movie by the thought that the casting director had a crucial job in finding the right actress for the role of Missy (Eliza Dushku). She has to play the bored, alienated outsider and yet be credible when cleaned up as the cheerleading squad’s first officer. She delivers. One of the advantages of an extensive home video collection is the ability to look Dushku up at the Internet Movie Database, find out she was in True Lies and say, I have that! and then watch it.

99 minutes.

24 August 2000

Yeah, I was laughing. Maybe not as much as with South Park or The Dinner Game but I was laughing. When Cedric the Entertainer did his routine about running, I have seen that on Cops often enough. The women in the row behind mine found any attempt at dance moves on the part of the comics highly funny.

116 minutes.

19 August 2000

For realism and suspense, it’s no Apollo 13. I had some difficulty with the history and technology, too. There is a scene that makes the point that the Soviet satellite in need of repair is too big for the shuttle to retrieve and return to earth. A character asks: how did you get it up there? This question is particularly ahistorical since the Soviet space program was known for its powerful boosters. The anxiety about the computer aboard the shuttle is also bogus. As far as I know, there is more than one flight dynamics computer aboard the shuttle, each running a separately written program to perform the same calculations, and then they vote amongst themselves for the consensus. So the failure of any one computer is not crippling. The orbital mechanics did not impress me either. One does not fly to the moon by aiming for it. I am simplifying, but you must aim for where the moon will be when you reach its orbital track.

140 minutes.

11 August 2000

Reading an article in cinefex finally led me to see this. No one told me it was this long. Since I have seen 13 hours of I, Claudius I found the simple moral posturing about republic and empire overstated. Only those who pay attention to the credits at the end will read that, although real names have been used, the events are fictional.

148 minutes.

08 August 2000

It took me 75 minutes to recognize the good stepsister from Ever After. The whole point of this bar is that guys would crowd in for a glimpse of the bartenders, right? So how come, at the two points in time when the plot requires it, the clientele is, like, 80% female? I don’t think so. Insufficient location shooting in New York.

98 minutes.

06 August 2000

115 minutes.

04 August 2000

113 minutes.