DVDs!

[sdelmonte]

Libraries are great. They have books. They trade paperbacks of comic books. They have videotapes. They have DVDs!

So I watched:

Ocean's 12 - While still fairly entertaining, Twelve wasn't the new Eleven after all. Rather than focus on one big heist, it bounces around Europe, and gets caught up in more plot than it needs, as well as a sequence that tries to be meta but is just silly. Still, Clooney, Pitt, Damon and the ensemble have a lot of fun, the script is reasonably intelligent, and Soderbergh uses a variety of eye-catching filming styles drawn from teh Eurpean New Wave. Good fun for a rainy day.

Shane - I saw this famous Western some years ago and enjoyed it. On this rewatching, however, its pacing problems are very evident, the performances seem stilted, and I wonder just why this fairly standard film is called a classic. Stick with High Noon for your dose of early 50s classic Western.

Star Wars: Clone Wars, series one - It's Jedis and Clone Troopers vs. Droids across the galaxy, and with Genndy Tartokovsky at the helm, it's everything the recent Star Wars could have been. From beginning to end, this is old-fashioned animation used to its fullest. Kudos to Tartokovsky, to Cartoon Network for airing this, and to Lucas for letting someone else play with his toys so well.

Constantine - Much derided both for ignoring most of the comic book version of John Constantine and for Keanu Reeves, I was looking forward to seeing this. I like Keanu, and I don't know much about comic book Constantine. So I was able to appreciate this as a stylish, occasionally outre, and offbeat horror film about a grade A a-hole, psychic and exorcist fighting the demons outside and within. There's nothing brilliant here, but the film entertains, and offers a somewhat original view of good and evil. Keanu is never going to be the next Tom Hanks, but he does angry and sarcastic heroes well. If you are a purist about Constantine, or are tired of blatant Christian themes, you won't care for this. But if you like colorful and demented horror films with strong heroes, you should have some fun. (That said, I keep wondering what would have been if they kept the basic plot but used the proper English Constantine. And for that matter, I wonder how the Winchester boys would have dealt with the same situation.)

Comments

[agonistes]

High Noon and Shane are a little different, as far as pervading ideology goes. Shane focuses more on the domestic and advocates a heteronormative, family-centric taming of the landscape. I think it's that, the cinematography, and the archetype of Shane (and he's so close to being a stock character because of that, but it's hard to call the textbook definition of the lone-gunfighter-knight-errant a stock character rather than an archetype) that keeps it on the classics list. It's certainly not one of my favorites, either...but I think I automatically get disowned anyhow for preferring Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood.

Interesting trivia: Jack Schaefer may have written the novel, but it was A.B. Guthrie -- Pulitzer-winning author of The Big Sky, The Way West, and four other connected novels about the West -- who did the screenplay for Shane, and Guthrie stole some stuff almost word-for-word from Frederick Jackson Turner's essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History". Guthrie was good at bringing the meta into his work, though I found it a little heavy-handed in Shane.

[sdelmonte]

I was finding myself wondering what an Eastwood reimagining of Shane would be like. Or rather, either a version of this with the younger, iconic Eastwood, or a contemporary Eastwood-directed version of the film, probably but not necessarily starring him.

[agonistes]

...funnily enough, Eastwood made one.

Pale Rider. In some places a shot-for-shot remake. And no surprise, but I much prefer it to Shane.

(My HTML is pastede on yay.)

[batyatoon]

... you realize, we totally need to see this now.

[buongiornodaisy.livejournal.com]

I think I automatically get disowned anyhow for preferring Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood.

Srsly? *is confused* I thought Leone was the cream of the crop. (Well, there was that John Ford guy...)

[agonistes]

...yes?

'Spaghetti Western' is actually a derogatory descriptor established by American directors astounded at the audacity of non-American directors like Leone and Karl May who thought they could do Westerns.

And then they turned out to be good.

Anyway. You won't see John Wayne in a spaghetti -- possibly because the moral compass is too non-fixed.

[buongiornodaisy.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I didn't think they were looked down upon now, since Leone's name pops up often in film discussions, though I'm not sure it's because people actually like them or if they're just there for Eastwood and Morricone.

[buongiornodaisy.livejournal.com]

Hee, you said European New Wave. *geeks*