Iron Man was so awesome that I almost wish I was sober for it.

Point Break LIVE!!

This sounds like the most awesome thing in the history of awesome things. rivetpepsquad and I are going to the 7:30 show on Sat May 3.

Point Break LIVE! is the absurdist stage adaptation of the 1992 Keanu Reeves/Patrick Swayze extreme-sports blockbuster that tells the story of former College football star, Johnny Utah, in pursuit of the surfing, bank robbing, skydiving, bare-hand-fighting adrenaline-junkie-cum-Zen-master Bodhi Sattva.

Point Break LIVE! features armed robbery, big-wave surfing, car chases, explosions, no less than two extended skydiving sequences and an indoor monsoon. This "action" play offers a true cathartic experience, putting you in the water with the surfers, throwing you out the door of an airplane and robbing you at gunpoint. Add in the hotness factor- surfer dudes and female stunt doubles and you have a night of live theater that rivals anything by Samuel Beckett in terms of pure excitement and energy.

The starring role of Johnny Utah is selected from the audience each night, and reads their entire script off of cue-cards. This method manages to capture the rawness of a Keanu Reeves performance even from those who generally think themselves incapable of acting. The fun starts immediately with the "screen test" wherein the volunteer Keanus (usually 5-15 men and women vie for the role) go through a grueling audition process. The part is then cast via applaus-o-meter.

Kathryn Bigelow- and Peter Iliff-approved!

Increased Milk Production: The devolution of Castro businesses back into the 70's continues.

More, more, more.

I haven't been posting movie reviews in 2007 as I have in previous years, and this is why. I think my new year's resolution may have to be, "I am never going to a movie theatre again, and this time I really mean it." Next year, I should just wait for cable for everything. That way I can fast-forward. And the popcorn will be better, too.

As best I can recall, here are the movies I saw in theatres in 2007, and the shortest possible reviews I can muster, which in two thirds of the cases, is the longest review that they deserve:

There's a new Beowulf trailer out now, and it looks even worse than the last one. I didn't realize they had turned all of the actors into video game characters. Um... why?

So, I've pretty much stopped writing movie and book reviews this year*, but you should go read BLDBLOG's review of Sunshine for a pretty good explanation (albeit in that weirdly drug-addled and overblown BLDBLOGgish way) of how it was almost a great movie, and then went completely off the rails into OMG Suck.

* Partly I just haven't felt like it, but mostly I didn't get the impression that many people whose opinions I care about were actually reading them.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Christina Ricci is joining Larry and Andy Wachowski's live-action adaptation of the 1960s cartoon Speed Racer. Emile Hirsch, Susan Sarandon and John Goodman already have boarded the high-octane project, which is based on the anime series created by Tatsuo Yoshida for Japanese audiences and later imported to the United States.

Speed centers on a young race car driver, Speed (Hirsch), and his quest for glory in his thundering, gadget-laden vehicle, Mach 5. Ricci will star as Speed's girlfriend, Trixie, his formidable ally on and off the track.

I just watched This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which I'd been waiting for since I first saw the preview about a year ago. It's great, and infuriating. I don't think it ever actually opened in theatres in San Francisco. The official web site is hosted by IFC, but their channel is not actually showing it any more. They're selling the DVD online, but I find it more than a little ironic, given the subject matter, that the easiest way to see this movie is via Bittorrent.

Anyway, it's a documentary about how the MPAA ratings board works, and who makes the decisions about what movies you get to see (since an NC-17 rating is the kiss of death to distribution and to advertising budgets). The MPAA is very secretive about this: they're the gatekeepers of a huge part of our culture, and we don't get to know who they are or how they make their decisions. So the filmmakers hired a private detective to figure out who these people are. That part is very entertaining. The best part, though, is the side-by-side comparisons of what gets an R and what gets an NC-17. Hint: they don't like women who enjoy sex, or gays.

The MPAA, of course, gave it an NC-17. How could they resist?

Trailers:

Director Kirby Dick's blog. And his response to some "changes" the MPAA said they would make after they started having to answer uncomfortable questions as a result of this documentary.

Watch the DVD bonus material too, it's also good.

"Get me a whip or I walk"

Harrison Ford has threatened to leave the new Indiana Jones movie unless he gets to use a real whip. The 64-year-old actor has been told the weapon will have to be computer generated because of new film safety rules. But Harrison thinks the regulations are ridiculous and has reportedly said he'll pull out of the film if he can't wield his own whip.

A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope

If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2. [...] Much of Obi-Wan's behaviour in this film, and Yoda's in the next, can best be understood if they are frankly scared to death of what Luke might become.

This is the best Star Wars nerding I've read since The Endor Holocaust...

I think I've seen more movies than this lately, but I can't remember any others, very probably because they all sucked.

The Prestige

I loved the book, and I thought the movie did a good job of capturing it. It must have been tricky to adapt, since the book is, basically, two diaries, the first half of the book being the story from one guy's point of view, and the second half from the other's. The movie followed a more linear structure, and I think pulled it off pretty well without screwing up any of the revelations. But, if I hadn't read the book, I'm not sure I would have really understood what was going on: a lot of it seemed pretty glossed over.

I liked this a lot. It's weird in the way that 2001 is weird, and the effects are great in the way 2001's effects are great. There are 3 interleaved stories, some of which might not really have happened. It's a cool structure. I also liked that the connection between the "present" and "future" stories -- the part where the protagonist finishes his project and changes the world -- is left completely implied.

I only saw this because it was the only movie starting that day at 2pm. Even with my expectations wedged firmly down in the fifth sub-basement, this movie is complete crap. It's approximately as bad as Harry Potter, possibly even as bad as Dungeons and Dragons. Though at least Dungeons and Dragons had beholders. This has no beholders. And the dragon has feathers. Feathers!

Certainly the best Bond movie in recent memory, though it gets a little too talky and spends a little too much time psychoanalyzing him. I like that it is not smirky and stupid like most Bond movies, and that the violence is actually ugly. This Bond acts like the thug that he is.

The "parkour" stuff at the beginning was a pale shadow of District B13.

This is the one about the founding of the CIA. From this movie we can learn that: A) secret agents are emotionless bureaucrats, B) anyone who ever tells you the slightest fib is probably going to try and get you killed, C) LSD is not a good truth serum, D) senators and spies like playing homoerotic scat games. It's long, and didn't quite put me to sleep, but only just.

The long out-of-print Urgh! A Music War will be showing on VH1C on Mon, Oct 30 at 6pm PST (9pm EST). They have it listed as "2 hours", which I hope means it's the 124-minute edit, not the 96-minute edit that ran on Sundance a few years ago. It would behoove you to record this, as it's probably the second-best concert film ever made. *

Also, here's a decent documentary about Blade Runner (52 minutes). There's not a lot new in there if you've read Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (which you should) but at 40:00, there's a deleted scene that I hadn't seen before of Deckard visiting Holden in the hospital.

*   #1: Laurie Anderson, Home of the Brave; #3: Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense.

Update: The VH1 showing was the same as the Sundance showing, except they omitted three more acts: Surf Punks, My Beach My Wave; The Cramps, Tear It Up; and Invisible Sex, Valium. Leaving out that Cramps performance was nuts -- it's one of the high points of the movie! Both showings omitted three other performances, which I haven't seen since the 80s: Gary Numan Down in the Park (he drove around the stage in a little bumper car!); Skafish, Sign of the Cross; and Splodgenessabounds, Two Little Boys.

This is genius.

Lyle Hopwood uncovers a lost Ballard work, apparently the only surviving fragment from JGB's novelization of David Cronenberg's film of Alien, before the studio infamously got cold feet and replaced Cronenberg with Ridley Scott and Ballard with Alan Dean Foster.

Statler & Waldorf have a movie review podcast: bizarrely, it seems to be audio-only. That's right: listening to puppets. I think maybe this is the direct podcast link.