Blu-ray weekend

I've been shut in with a bad head & chest cold this weekend. This one is bad, real bad. Fortunately, it was raining like hell yesterday, and I did have 3 blu-rays from Netflix to keep me company. The three are:

1. The Watchmen
2. Paranormal Activity
3. Inglorious Basterds

The Watchmen Redux

Jesus! This movie is far worse than I remembered! I thought I would give it a second chance on the possibility that I might have missed something. Well... I did. This movie is far more absurd, preposterous, and laughable than I remembered it.

There are a large collection of terrible scenes in this movie; scenes that caused a lot of bad belly laughs this time around. I can't really blame Snyder for it. These scenes are all in the graphic novel as well. When you try to shoot these preposterous scenes with a serious and dramatic tone, they only come out more laughable. Regrettably, the tone of the novel is serious as well. Zach was just being faithful to rubbish.

Consider the pivotal scene on Mars. Laurie Jupiter (Silk Spectre II) has to convince Jon (Dr. Manhattan) to save the world from nuclear amageddon. We have a completely nonsensical scene full of dialog about predestination. They argue about his bizarre perspective on life in the universe. Laurie insists that Jon "do that thing" he does, and make her understand his bizarre perspective. Manhattan complies, touching her forehead in a Vulcan mild-meld.

Rather than understanding Manhattan's perspective on life and the universe, Laurie has an Opra moment of psychoanalytic breakthrough. She recovers a lost memory of her childhood in which it was revealed that the Comedian (a hero who once attempted to rape her mother) is her actual father. Mama got together with papa later to let him finish the job.

Now how in the fuck did this happen? How did Manhatten's attempt to communicate his perspective cause her to remember her repressed memory of childhood? How does A connect to B? Only through some series of logical fallacies promoted by the use of hallucinogenics, I am sure. Alan Moore was that kind of a guy. By all accounts, he believed mushrooms were a great aid to one's creative imagination.

But wait! There is still more! Laurie, an ordinary female without super powers, strikes a crystal wall of Dr. Manhattan's... er... apparatus... and the whole thing comes tumbling down. Boy! She's a lot stronger than she looks. Laurie says her entire life is a joke. This is emblematic of her father. Jon shocks the audience by 'realizing' that the improbable miracle of Laurie's chaotic origins proves that humanity is worth saving. Say what...? And he is not even mad that she smashed his... er... apparatus.

But wait! There is still more! The artificial 3d effects camera pulls back from this scene on Mars to show that the destruction of Dr. Manhatten's... er... apparatus has left a huge land-scar on the surface of Mars. This land scar is in the shape of the Comedian's happy face logo. Yep, I am sure that can occur naturally when a crystal apparatus get's smashed on Mars. I am sure Dr. Manhattan would want to do something like that also. Jesus that is a stupid idea! Who had that fucking idea? Oh yeah, it was mushroomhead Moore again.

This incredibly botched concept for a scene is both pivotal and emblematic of the problems with the rest of the movie. There are a whole lot of bad ideas found here. Many of them brought out belly laughs the second time around. [Especially the scene where Rorschach wards off a SWATT team with a can of Lysol and a matchbook.]

Then we have the obnoxiously bad ended. I already complained about this at some length. Hard to believe it is true, but Zach Snyder cleaned up (i.e. changed) an even worse ending found in the original graphic novel.

Bottom line folks: Watchmen is a steaming, stinking, stenching pile of wet and runny doggy poo-pooh. I regret the fact that Zach Snyder, a very good film maker, got involved with such a poor project as this. Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python fame, was wise to drop the project. It may be billed as the most celebrated graphic novel of all time, but that is 100% bullshit.

Paranormal Activity

Now we're talking! I am glad to say that Paranormal Activity lived up to its billing. It is a good and scary story. It is another one of the slew of camcorder movies which include Cloverfield and Quarantine. I liked these movies also. The story is very simple: A young woman, engaged to be engaged with the man she is cohabitation with is being haunted by a daemon. This daemon has been following her throughout her youth. Without much of any effects budget, cameras or actors, they bring off a very nice supernatural suspense thriller. This one raises tension very nicely.

Reports of this movie stated that women found it utterly terrifying, throwing their popcorn in the air and jumping out of their seats. I think these reports are believable. These women probably related closely to the chubby--but good looking--protagonist who seems to have found Mr. Right only to go to the edge of ruin because of something horridly evil chasing her. I know this movie would utterly kill my mother and my aunt. The second the Ouiji board appears on camera they would both duck and cover. They both have a fear of those things. Fortunately, the odds of getting them to watch this film are slim and none.

Inglorious Basterds

Well... it's a fun movie, and it is pretty well made. The leading villain, Christopher Waltz, makes this movie work. He is very interesting villain to watch in action. By now, I think it's safe to assume everybody knows that this movie re-wrote the end of WWII. You'll have to get over that. If you can, the movie is fun, but it is not more than that.

As is the case with a lot of Quentin Tarantino movies, I believe this movie is over-rated. Tarantino makes B-flick exploitation movies, and he knows it. I, generally, like this kind of thing, but I fail to see why he is celebrated so much when others are celebrated so little. Why is Tarantino good and John Carpenter bad? Critics cannot explain this to me.

In any case, this movie is worth watching.

Logan's Run and the Blu-Ray effect

Logan's Run is a SciFi movie released in 1976 starring Michael York and Jenny Agutter. I was 9 going on 10 when it came out. I remember it well. I was a big-time Trek fan, so my folks usually sent me off to see most of the new SciFi movies. I can't tell you I was totally thrilled by the movie, as it had some obvious narrative potholes which even a 10 year old could figure out. Still, the movie developed a big following and got turned into a rather dreadful TV series which did not last long. That one died like the Planet of Apes series did.

Last night, Logan's Run arrived at my mailbox on Blu-Ray. It was sent to me my Netflix of course. I stashed it my queue only because I wanted to see how well the re-master would turn out. It turns out that they did a very nice job with the conversion. My biggest gripe about the disk is that they did not do a full DTS-HD Master Audio sound track for the movie. This makes a huge difference for anyone with even modest audio hardware.

Strangely enough, it turns out that I liked the movie better than I thought I would at this age. Issues of mortality and renewal are not that well appreciated by a 9 year old. The movie still has those dreadful narrative potholes I mentioned before. They are definitely still evident.

In short, the movie gets off to a flying start introducing you to their rendition of the 23rd century. It is a Utopia with fly in the ointment. Mankind lives only for pleasure in this society, but you only get to live 30 years. In your 30th year, you must go on Carousel which is a thrilling zero gravity ride that ends when your body explodes, as everyone in the audience cheers for you to Renew. That is, reincarnate in a new body.

It is obvious how the economics of this Utopia work. By maintaining an exclusively young population, you avoid all the medical costs associated with aging, costs that I myself and just becoming familiar with at 43 (after two knee surgeries). Geriatric care is a massive drain our on collectively resources. If you could avoid that, you would make an abundance of resources available for other purposes. I myself would not have needed any surgeries if I had died 13 years ago on Carousel.

It is a little interesting for a former 9 year old kid to watch this same movie at the age of 43 and realize that he would now be 13 years older than anyone in this civilization. It boggles the mind to think that you would be the most experienced, the most veteran, the most elder member of such a society if you showed up on their doorstep. It is hard to believe that it has been 34 years already.

The dreaded narrative potholes begin when Logan 5 receives special mission order 033-03 from the mainframe computer. He is ordered to penetrate the city seals, seek and destroy Sanctuary, and account for the 1056 unaccounted for runners who seemed to have escaped the system. Logan's life-clock is "retrogrammed" to indicate that he is approaching Last Day, when he should have 4 years left. Logan 5 makes a series of unwarranted saltations, big illogical leaping inferences, based on zero information from the computer. Now he is only 26 years old, so you can expect him to be a bit unreasonable. Still, those jumps are quite unwarranted, and they are critical to the entire course of action he chooses for the rest of this movie.

Still, I did find myself enjoying this movie more than I did when I was a kid. However, I have to give the major credit to Blu-Ray & HDTV. As per usual, Blu-Ray is so much more immersive and cinematic that it makes even weaker movies seem stronger. Dave's law says that Blu-Ray adds 10 points to the score of any movie, regardless of how weak or how strong. If you have a movie that scores 80/100 in the theater, it will be 90/100 at home on Blu-Ray. This is the Blu-Ray effect.

One little illustration for you: Just a week or two ago, my brother & my cousin Nick came over for a showing Inglorious Basterds. The first words out Nick's mouth were the following "It looks so much better than it did in the theater! When are the theaters going to get HD?" I had to chuckle on that one. They need 4K (at least) for the kind of screens sizes they employ, and they are working hard on it.

About 40 minutes into the movie, my brother declared that he was enjoying the film a hell of a lot more than he did in the theater. He saw it in Denmark, during the summer, when his band was on tour in Europe. The Danish used Danish captions, which made it tough for him to follow the French & German parts. He also mentioned that he thought it looked and sounded a lot better at home.

So the moral of the story is as follows: Check out a few movies you remember as marginal, just as soon as they become available on Blu-Ray. You might be impressed to see how much better they are.