The State of the Cabins (9/29/10)

Things to Click On
* If you haven't checked out Rachel's unique take on the old Screenshot game, you must, and soon. She's done four of them now (new ones released every Saturday), and the latest was my favorite yet. (Rachel's Reel Reviews)

* I love it when Daniel gets all thoughtful and introspective. Really. (Getafilm)

* Well, Nick's got his Vlog, but Jason's got his new "Jason Made a Video" series. Like Rachel, it's pretty young (he just posted #5). Though all are entertaining, #3 was far and away the tops. Outstanding! (Invasion of the B Movies)

* Speaking of Nick, in honor of our fellow LAMBcaster James, he counted down his Favorite Tree Moments. Ha! (Random Ramblings of a Demented Doorknob)

* I have some serious issues with the choices here, but countdowns of Ahnuld's top flicks should always be rewarded. (Anomalous Material)

Movies watched for the first time (non-theatrically) since last week:
* G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra - I really don't know what I can possibly say about this while still respecting myself. It's like it has a built-in excuse: if you watch this film on purpose and then proclaim it to be idiotic, then you're the moron for watching it in the first place. What else did you think it was going to be? I mean, have you seen the cartoon?

I grew up on the cartoon - it was probably my favorite at age 10 or so - and had little interest in seeing this. I had hoped that they would have either a) taken it a bit more seriously or b) go full-on cartoony - my biggest gripe with this adaptation is the lack of color. Joes wearing all-black outfits? I wanted this and this and this. Instead, we got a movie that had no shortage of ridiculous action...with booooooooooring characters. Sure, Jo-Go was a great get to cast as the future Cobra Commander, but he spends 95% of this flick bottled up as some scientist with crap covering up his face. The stage is setup for Destro, but again, 95% of the flick he's boring old Christopher Eccleston. Channing Tatum and Dennis Quaid? Two of the most boring movie stars of the last 30 years.

At least there were a few plusses. Marlon Wayans was a welcome sight as some G.I. Joe character I don't even remember. They brought on two of my favorite character (and foreign) actors in Said Taghmaoui and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, but of course, both have glorified bit parts as we focus on the boring white guys. Sienna Miller is appealing in many ways as The Baroness, and it's always nice to see the Bizarro Billy Zane (aka Arnold Vosloo), playing Zartan here.

It's just ok. Stupid as hell, but if you must satisfy your nostalgia bone and give it a watch, I won't blame you.

Fletch's Film Rating:

	Expectation: "I want you to punch me as hard as you can."
	Reality: "Whatever.."

LAMBScore:

P.S. - I still have yet to figure out - at all - why Snake Eyes has lips. It's fucking weird, and worst of all, pointless. If you're gonna change a beloved character like that, at least make it worthwhile.

Music I'm currently obsessed with:
Is it possible to be obsessed with something I haven't heard yet? Royksopp's Senior was released on September 13, but even the great Amazon doesn't have anything other than the dreaded "Import," a license to charge 2-3x as much for essentially the same product. Much as I want it, I can wait.

Book I'm currently reading:
* Still Chuck Klosterman's novel Downtown Owl. Still digging it just as much as I did the first time around. The only downside to this thing is it's length - it's only around 250 pages, and when you get a book that you really love, that's nowhere near enough.

Next up? Well, I put out some feelers on the Facebook page and got some recommendations (thank you very much). Put a few of them on the list, so stay tuned.

And then...

A time and place for everything...

Daniel of Getafilm has hopped on the meme train. He's called it The Favorite Movie Period/Place Meme, but you're actually supposed to write about your favorite Martin Scorsese films. Ok, that's a blatant lie - he just doesn't like the title.

THE RULES:
1.) Think of a place (real or fictional) and time (past, present, future) portrayed in a movie (or a few) that you would love to visit.
2.) List the setting, period, applicable movie, and year of the applicable movie's release (for reference).
3.) Explain why, however you'd like (bullet points, list, essay form, screenshots, etc.). If this is a time and place that you have intimate knowledge of, feel free to describe what was done well and what wasn't done well in portraying it.
4.) If possible, list and provide links to any related movies, websites, books, and/or articles that relate to your choice (s).
5.) Modify Rules #1-4 to your liking. And come up with a better name for this meme.
6.) Link back to this Getafilm post in your post, please.
7.) Tag at least five others to participate!

For Daniel's own entry, he chose Back to the Future Part II's Hill Valley circa 2015, as portrayed in the 1989 Robert Zemekis film. Much as I hate to choose something so close to his, my choice is remarkably similar. Although not so strictly tied to one film, I love films that are set just barely in the future, and in a world that looks remarkably like ours, but with some very subtle differences.

The two most recent and best examples I can think of this are 2003's Code 46 and 2006's Children of Men.

Look, it's (relatively) easy to come up with the kind of world portrayed in films like The Matrix or The Fifth Element - these movies are set so far into the future (at least 200 years) that the writers and filmmakers have no rules. They can fit Earth, or any other setting of their choosing, to look however they need to so that it works with the story. I'm reminded of the great line in Thank You for Smoking where Aaron Eckhart's cigarette lobbyist is talking to a Hollywood superagent played by Rob Lowe. They're discussing a possible future movie set in space starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Brad Pitt, and Eckhart wonders aloud how they might fit smoking into the film, especially since the characters would be in a highly flammable, all-oxygen environment. Lowe's answer - sure, they would probably blow up, "But it's an easy fix. One line of dialogue. 'Thank God we invented the... you know, whatever device.'"

Films set in the very near future wouldn't get away with such easy fixes. They have to play by the laws of physics and cultural norms that we are already familiar with, and they'd have trouble convincing us that there might realistically be flying cars within the next five years. We're aware of the technology that's out there, and while we're willing to make small leaps in the service of believability, you and I both know that time travel to distant dimensions ain't happening anytime soon.

Films like Code 46 and Children of Men, meanwhile, are set in worlds that look stunningly like the one we inhabit, but are given tweaks so slight, so ingenious, that we can suspend any disbelief we might have and completely swallow the medicine we're given. They're set less than 25 years into the future, but smartly don't look it (at all) at first glance. Contrast this to the doomed world of Terminator Salvation; though it admittedly is playing with a timeline that was set in stone in the mid-80s, the idea that world would or even could look like the post-apocalyptic/robot-dominated portrayed as being 2018 is ludicrous. Instead, think of the odd handheld, finger-intense video game that was being played by Danny Huston's lover (friend?) in Children (he can be seen in the background of the picture below), or the beautiful way that languages from all over the world are blended into a singular universe-speak in Code. Or the instant foam airbag replacement system on display in Demolition Man. Back to the Future II, for all it's sci-fi nonsense (ground-up coffee beans powering a time-travelling Delorean?) still showed many inspired tidbits, many of which Daniel called out in his post, from self-tying shoes to personalized entertainment channels to even the hydratable pizzas.

All of these things might never happen, but they could, and soon. Sign me up.


Other films that sometimes (or more) fit my "Period/Place:"
V for Vendetta
A Scanner Darkly
Robocop
Freejack
Gattaca
Strange Days
I, Robot

And now, for some tagging! Like Daniel, the main ingredient for picking a taggee is choosing someone whom I think will take part. And not picking people that he already chose.

* Nick at Random Ramblings of a Demented Doorknob
* Tommy Salami at Pluck You, Too!
* Tony Dayoub at Cinema Viewfinder
* Jess at Insight Into Entertainment
* Alex from Film Forager

And then...

Knockin' out a couple memes

In case you didn't already know this, I'm terrible at memes. I'm not totally sure why, but I think I have a good idea. In the end, I think it all comes down to my own jealousy and insecurity. See, someone'll tag me for one and I'll sit there with my new found invisible crown thinking "Yay! This person likes me and/or my writing enough to want to see what I have to say about this topic!"

I'm honestly flattered, and have every intention of taking part in the meme. But then I start thinking things like "Maybe they just think I have better connections than them and can use me to further the meme for their benefit" or "I like being a leader - creating my own damn meme - if I take part in this one, I'm just a follower, and I hate being a follower."

Or maybe I'm just lazy and I lack discipline. Ain't that right, Arnold?

Anyway, I've been tagged by two memes...recently. Okay, that's not true - one was recently, and the other tagging occurred sometime in the last millennium, I believe. Oh well...better late than never, right?

First up, from Deadpan, the Top 10 Man Crushes in film meme.

The Rules:

This can be a character, actor, director, really anyone working on films. The only thing is, they must be a personality. You have to really know something about them. This rules out most producers, cinematographers, etc.

If you are a man, these man crushes, obviously must be men. If you are a woman than I say they have to be a woman. They must be the same sex as the writer making their list.

You can choose anyone living or dead. They must be chosen due to their film content. If you choose Michael J. Fox and the only thing you like about him is his role in Family Ties then he doesn't work. But if you choose Michael J. Fox because you love Marty McFly, and you want to mention that you also love Family Ties, that is acceptable.

Later, in a comment, he added this:

"It seems everyone thought by man crush I just meant favorite males in movies, but by using the term man crush rather than just saying that specifically I was trying to get across that these weren't just men I admired but men I would aspire to be like in my daily life, men who make me wish I were someone else for the duration of the time I am watching them."

Luckily for Deadpan, this is the tagging that occurred some time ago (November 19, to be exact). As that's the case, we can forgive him for even using the term Man crush in the first place - it hadn't been really, truly beaten into the ground until I Love You, Man was released.


Secondly, I was tagged by Getafilm for the 10 Favorite Characters meme. No rules necessary here, as it's super self-explanatory.

To further the ire of meme-rs (?) everywhere and to further my standing within the meme community, I'm gonna be one of those people who just ignores all of the rules and makes up their own. In this case, I'll be doing this by combining the two memes into one Super Meme, picking My 10 Favorite Characters by My 10 Man crushes. Or something like that. Alright, enough exposition...

10. Can you admit when you were wrong? Can you get out of jail and act as a savior to your flailing family? Can you do it all with a giant swastika on your chest? American History X's Derek Vineyard was a role model to so many impressionable kids when he shouldn't have been, and couldn't become a role model fast enough to his own brother when he should have been. Either way, he's Edward Norton's best role by a long shot (well, maybe not that long - Primal Fear's Aaron was pretty damn good, too).

9. I'll flip you. "Flip you fo real," says Fred Fenster, Benicio del Toro's breakout Usual Suspects role.

8. I've got a bit of a man crush on Joseph Gordon-Levitt - I find him to be the most appealing young actor working today (though at 28, it's not as though he's the kid from Third Rock from the Sun anymore). Problem is, I don't particularly like any of his characters just yet. Brick's Brendan probably comes closest, though that film didn't sit all that well with me in the end.

7. Jason Statham's Transporter role, Frank Martin. Because sometimes you just wish you could kick that much ass.

6. Impatient with sunglasses-at-night-wearing dolts, quick with a pop-culture reference (Bonnie & Clyde) while stuck in the trunk of a car, and capable of knocking off banks without even so much as a gun, Out of Sight's Jack Foley is a flawed hero we can all get behind. It also served as the key ingredient to George Clooney being taken seriously as a film actor.

5. (Speaking of bank robbers...) He understands the many philosophies of the world. He can catch a football almost as well as he catches a wave. I never wanted to take Baby out of the corner or make clay pots with Demi Moore, but I could definitely stand to be Bodhi from Point Break.

4. In most cases, I'd think it loco to have a man crush on Samuel L. Jackson. But as Jackie Brown's Ordell Robbie, the man oozed style (and a bit of sleaze). Jules Winfield got all the press, but would you really want that dripping-ass mop for a head of hair?

3. Oh, to have the quick wit and on-the-spot cunning of Irwin M. Fletcher. Gun to his face and he's still cracking jokes. In jail with a pansexual ogre and the one-liners don't stop coming. If he has fear, he doesn't show it much. It's funny that Chevy Chase might be remembered most as the buffoonish dad from the Vacation series, because as he showed in the two Fletch films and the two Caddyshack films, he's capable of being one of the smoothest operators around.

2. Is it possible to have a man crush on someone old enough to be your father? Like so many others in my demographic, the influence of Ford on our lives is large and inescapable. And while Han Solo would be a worthy pick, I can't pass up Indiana Jones from his first film, where Ford showed us that we can all be brainy, tough as nails, creative, sarcastic, spontaneous...

1. Nic Cage Just kidding.

1. Do I really aspire to be couch-dwelling, pot-smoking-from-a-honey-bear slacker? Do I really aspire to be Floyd from True Romance? No, probably not - but my man crush on Brad Pitt started with this, one of his earlier film roles, and certainly my favorite (though Tyler Durden and Snatch's Mickey come awfully close).

And then...

CAGEFEST: The Nic Cage Film Festival - National Treasure

CAGEFEST just keeps on truckin'. For previous entries, click here.

Daniel Getahun of Getafilm has established himself as one of the shining stars of the movie blogging community in just over a year's time. Reporting from the Twin Cities, where it seems as though every film goes before they go anywhere else, Daniel sees just about all of them, from the hits to indies to docs to foreign language flicks. I'm proud to call him a blogging friend and owner of one of my favorite sites. Here, he swallows his distaste for Nic Cage (he's just not quite as vocal about it as I) and gives us some reasons why National Treasure might not be so bad.

PRO
"Finding a National Treasure or: How I Learned to Stop Hating and Love Ben Gates"

Forgive me if this seems a bit strained. It's just that Nicolas Cage has been my least favorite actor - by a country mile - for going on about a decade now. The tics, the accents, the shouting - utterly unbearable for me. So when Fletch asked me to defend the indefensible and write a positive argument for a movie starring Cage, well it was simply a challenge that I had to take on and a fear that I had finally had to face.

Actually, it wasn't that hard. I love National Treasure. Moreover, I love Nicolas Cage as treasure hunter Ben Gates. Somehow, someway, a little action adventure that I didn't see in the theater slowly grew on me over a solid year of every-other-day showings on one of the Encore movie channels. The end result: me sitting in the theater at an opening weekend showing of National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets.

Between the witty, strong-willed woman (Diane Kruger), the sarcastically hilarious sidekick (Justin Bartha), and the deliciously deviant villain (Sean Bean), National Treasure almost plays like a second generation version of an Indiana Jones movie. And although Ben Gates is no Indy, he has his own charming personality quirks, like knowing archaic colonial ciphers and codes, and playing a brilliant game of show-and-tell with the original Declaration of Independence. Best of all, Cage attempts no accent and only has a couple of spaz attacks. The fact is, Indy is the spoiled, handsome action star while Gates is the nerdy underdog hero with the superstitious father (Jon Voight). Who would you rather root for?

If the stereotypical characters and the cheesy dialogue don't satisfy your need for a guilty pleasure, watch National Treasure for some decent action sequences and an insanely elaborate conspiracy theory. Who can't appreciate the entertainment value in that? Also, I've haven't even mentioned yet that the National Treasure franchise is one of the few action adventure series being produced these days that's appropriate for the whole family: no language, sex, gory violence, or otherwise inappropriate content, and no dark themes that can misinterpreted as subliminally evil. It's just honest-to-goodness silliness that you can watch with your kids on movie night.

There you go: Nicolas Cage, against all odds, as a provider of fun, wholesome cinematic entertainment.

Now don't anyone dare use that sentence out of the context of this movie.


Aside from owning one of the best blog names around (Careful With That Blog, Eugene - a play on an old Pink Floyd song), Paul Arrand Rogers is also the owner of an acerbic wit, a Muppet fetish and an all-Lebowski influenced rating system. It's no wonder I've become a fan of this relatively new LAMB (#116). Paul originally wrote a much lengthier piece here (nearly 2,000 words), and should he post it on his site, I will update here with a link to it. Though good, I'd wanted to keep these relatively short; much of what was cut was a synopsis of the plot.

CON
It was 2004. Steven Spielberg was making The Terminal, George Lucas was making Star Wars Episode III, and Harrison Ford was playing Jethro the Bus Driver in Water into Wine. To make matters worse, Brendan Fraser had seemingly given up swashbuckling and mummy bashing in favor of more serious pursuits (Crash) and Angelina Jolie had just raided her last tomb.

For über-producer and explosion maestro Jerry Bruckheimer, the timing couldn’t be riper. After the smashing success of Pirates of the Caribbean and Bad Boys II, America was not only willing to forget King Arthur (minus Keira Knightley in blue paint), but fully embrace whatever he could cook up next.

Luckily for Nic Cage, it involved him.

In a post Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade world, numerous heroes attempted to wrest the fedora and bullwhip from Indy’s hands. Pitfall Harry had a son, Jack T. Colton romanced a stone, Lara Croft carried two guns but couldn’t sustain a franchise, and Rick O’Connell killed the same mummy…twice. Clearly, nobody could out-adventure the man in the hat. Bruckheimer had a different plan: Out-lecturing him.

See, the other part to the Indiana Jones mythos is that Jones was one hell of a professor. His lectures were interesting, he had his pick of college girls, and he was always getting called off on assignment to pick up one relic or another – lots of time off.

National Treasure has Ben Gates, who, like Indiana Jones, rescues treasure from the clutches of devious foreigners, but, unlike Indiana Jones, isn’t very fun. He’s a bookworm, you see, and not like Indy where he pulls a book off a shelf or flips to a random page in a random book and finds what he’s looking for before jetting off to India, Egypt, and Parts Unknown. Gates lectures. Gates reads. Gates searches. Gates solves puzzles. But by Jove, Indy, he doesn’t do anything!

All this would be fine, if Gates had the charisma to pull this off. Sadly, Harrison Ford isn’t playing him. It’s Nic Cage, and boy is he hungry for a payday.

This movie? It’s bad. I knew that walking out of the movie theater as a 16 year old, impressionable idiot, and I know that now. It was successful, for the most part, due to America’s hunger for Indiana Jones-style movies. It’s true. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, lackluster as it may have been, out grossed the National Treasure franchise (and Tomb Raider, and, while it’s $141 million away from The Mummy franchise’s mark, we’re comparing one movie to three).

There’s a lure to Indiana Jones, as Roger Ebert said, because “it's the kind of movie where the hero gets out of bed wondering what daring exploits and astonishing, cliff-hanging, death-defying threats he will have to survive in the next ten seconds.” By contrast, Benjamin Gates gets out of bed and geeks out about Freemason symbols and invisible ink. He does not swashbuckle, isn’t dashing, and certainly doesn’t have the same droll wit as Indy (though Cage really tries to get him there). He’s boring.

This is CAGEFEST though, so what of Nic? Well, truth be told, it isn’t his fault that the movie acts less like a thriller and more like the cure for insomnia. He tries really hard to put some life into the movie, he’s really excited about the twists, the turns, and his inexplicable ability to solve complex and inane riddles, but the script just isn’t there for him.

The script tries to be there for instead for his sidekick, Justin Bartha, who makes you pine for Indy 4’s Mutt Williams. Any attempt at suspense or drama with this film is needlessly smashed to bits by Bartha’s “funny” dialog. I don’t think it would have been better with a different actor, but not being stuck thinking about the retard who “wanted to go to the Baywatch” probably would have helped.

Otherwise, the movie suffers from the same thing that many Bruckheimer produced action movies suffer – overproduction. The movie has all the gloss of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (the 2005 movie was worse than this one), and suffers for it. Count the number of cuts from Nic Cage to Dianne Kruger to both to a different shot of both etc. in a scene where the two are merely changing. It’s unnecessary and distracting.

Cage does his all to drag this movie out of the library it’s rooted in, but such a task is nigh impossible when the script insists on showing you how everything is possible and connecting most of the clues to documents and artifacts that most Americans haven’t heard about to not give a damn about them. Cage is dealing with the unexplainable, much like Harrison Ford, but nothing in National Treasure begs to be explained.

It’s a genuine effort from Nic, but I believe that most of his movies are. He has a Christopher Walken-like tendency to accept any role thrown his way, and here, it’s a blessing and a curse. Cage made a lot of money, but he looked like a fool. As Riley Poole says, at least he gets the girl.

And then...