Boy's Weekend Out
Melissa and Solomon are visiting the twins in LA this weekend and my sister is off having her second baby tonight, so everyone is busy but me. I've been catching up on movies and music here, and harassing the cat. Caught Van Helsing last night. Dumb and noisy, and Kate Beckinsale's marble-mouthed Romanian accent was almost tolerable. However, so many effects in every shot made the film ultimately dull and lifeless because the actual live actors had to work so hard at imagining anything beyond the full circle of green screens around them that they kind of forgot to insert any kind of chemistry and passion into the work. (Which is looking past the disaster of a script in the first place.)
Unlike Man on Fire, Tony Scott's new film, which bled and burned with passion. Tony's the more commercially driven of the Scott brothers and he veers towards Michael Bay territory with his pacing of cuts. But he's got the family eye for composition and Man on Fire was a fusion of the Scott style of color and composition and all the tricks and cinematic quirks that Oliver Stone tried to introduce us to with Natural Born Killers. It's a rare thing these days when a film delivers its emotional hits through both the music, the cinematography and the editing. Sorry. It's a rare thing when a thriller/revenge film delivers its sucker punches through the M and the C and E.
I picked up a stack of films from the library on the way home. I've got a new mix disc project in mind, and I'm going to be scanning a number of films for sound bytes. While those are running, I'll be finishing up a few music reviews that are outstanding and -- hopefully -- get two chapters of the novel done.
Yeah, brain on fire. That's what two hours of cinematic crack injected into my eyeballs will do.
Gotta run.