Back in June, I said that if I were marketing Josh Whedon's Serenity, I'd pitch it as 'more Star Wars than Star Wars'. As it turns out, I'd have been telling the truth. The movie owes a lot to Lucas's original trilogy, but it's clever and fun in all the ways the second trilogy isn't.
As local readers may recall, Mark of Raincity and I started up an incredibly non-competitive, informal soccer game last weekend. It was good fun, and despite our collective reluctance to run, goals were scored.
We're going to schedule future Rolly Polly Soccers on an ad hoc basis, roughly every two weeks. So, the next one will be a week from this Sunday, August 7 (we decided not to schedule one on the long weekend). There will be another one on August 21, vaguely associated with the Big Blogger Picnic.
We're using Upcoming.org to schedule these events. If you're interested in playing--and please do, it was more fun than a barrel of lemurs--you can RSVP here.
Note the guidelines regarding non-competitive play and being utterly crap at soccer.
UPDATE: I've fixed the event on Upcoming so that people can actually RSVP. I had selected 'Personal/Private', to differentiate it from, say, the Pride Parade. However, that apparently means it's an upcoming event for one. So, please, RSVP away.
I really like it when a city responds to its citizens, instead of forcing its citizens to change. One great example is that, for years, people were playing inline hockey on a public parking lot near English Bay. They'd set up a couple of milk crates as 'goals', and skate around. Eventually the city clued in that there was a demand for this, so they set up some concrete barricades and fencing as boards, and permanently fixed a couple of milk crates in appropriate locations. Voila--instant inline hockey rink. Cheap, cheerful and what the public wanted. Whenever I walk by, that space is in use.
Another is when the city pays attention to desire lines--the paths people make when they cut across an area instead of following the prescribed walkway. You see them all the time at universities. Yet another is this city of Victoria effort, which plasters tourist maps on the sides of otherwise unused switch boxes.
I'm digging this new recycyling rack. The city's recognized that the impoverished are going to dig through garbage cans to look for returnable cans and bottles. They've built a little rack (apologies for the crappy phone camera photo) that sits around the can that enables an exchange between the drinker and the needy:
First, a disclaimer: when it comes to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I'm biased. I have great love for Douglas Adams and all of his books. I recently read his biography, which only reaffirmed my affection for the man's work. Getting this movie made was one of Adams's dreams, and so there's simple pleasure in seeing it come to fruition. In short, I'm probably not seeing the film as clearly as I should. It does, however, feel like a film made for Adams fans, as opposed to the average person.
This movie only received the green light after the success of Men in Black, a movie which Adams charitably described as "familiar". Despite a keen fan base, the movie industry had, for twenty years, been highly sceptical of sci-fi comedy. There's a similarity between the two films, with surprising galactic stories and an everyman thrown into improbably circumstances.
The rest of my comments are after the jump. They do feature MINOR SPOILERS, most of which will be familiar to anyone who has read the novel or heard the radio show.
Cross-posted from DarrenBarefoot.com.
You probably didn't see Saved!
It pretty much tanked
at the box office, and didn't play in the cinema for very long. I think it failed
to attract both a Christian or a non-Christian audience. You should watch Saved!
on DVD, though.
I just watched it last night, and was really surprised (I love it when a film
surprises me) and impressed. I expected a vicious, anti-religious screed, but
instead I watched a clever, funny, subversive movie about teens growing up Christian.
On one level, it's just a teen movie in the tradition of John Hughes and American
Pie. On another, the film explores how modern, American Christianity deals
with difference.
Read on for the complete review.
Cross-posted from my site.
I actually saw these two British films a couple of weeks ago, but have been too busy to write anything about them. Usually that means I just abandon any interest in reviewing a film, but these two have stuck in my head.
Enduring Love begins with the most unlikely of incidents. A man and a woman open a picnic basket in a field in Oxford on a sunny day. Suddenly, their pastoral splendour is interrupted by a hot-air balloon that lurches across the field. The man, Joe, joins four other men to try to bring it to safety. As they all hang on to the balloon, struggling to bring it back to ground, there's a serene pause. They all recognize their situation--a classic prisoner's dilemma. What follows sets up the slow-burn thriller that is the rest of the film.
Read on for the rest of the review.
Cross-posted from DarrenBarefoot.com.
Team America: World Police should be an incisive attack on American foregn policy. It should also be a hilarious spoof of action movies. Unfortunately, it's neither. Instead, it's an unoriginal, hollow movie that barely flirts with political satire. Worse, it's not very funny. Trey Parker and Matt Stone's previous film, South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut, was both enormously funny and subtly seditious. Perhaps it was unfair of me to expect more of the same from Team America, but I left disappointed.
The plot of Team America revolves around a kind of red, white and blue Justice League of America, who fight terrorists with lustful abandon on foreign and domestic shores. The film features all the usual action movie characters--the reticent hero, the love interest, the super-villian (a fey but lonely Kim Jong-Il is a rare bright spot)--and conventions. In fact, a number of scenes and lines are borrowed directly from other films.
Read on for the rest of the review.
Cross-posted from DarrenBarefoot.com.
Wilby Wonderful is a dark comedy set on an island set off the east coast of Canada. We meet the townsfolk of Wilby on the eve of a scandal that threatens to stain their idyllic island life. They’re familiar archetypes—the upstanding town sheriff, the hot-to-trot older woman from the mainland, the horny teenager, the strong, silent handyman, the upwardly-mobile real estate agent—but we are often surprised by their non-archetypal behaviour. They wrestle with ordinary problems, mostly, and seek a new, precarious balance in their tiny community.
Watching this ensemble cast is like meeting old friends. It is a who’s-who of Canada’s finest actors—Paul Gross, Sandra Oh, Callum Keith Rennie, Maury Chaykin, Rebecca Jenkins, James Allodi and Ellen Page. Add Sarah Polley and Molly Parker, and you’d have an all-star cast of those-who-have-eschewed-Hollywood (Ms. Polley being the occasional, regrettable exception). Like so many Canadian films, Wilby Wonderful is an extremely quiet film. Yet, they are all such fine, humble performers they manage the minimal dialogue and lingering shots with ease.
Read on for the rest of the review.
James Toback's When Will I Be Loved is Indecent Proposal with none of the tension and delusions of grandeur. Not only is it utterly unoriginal, but the plot is as flimsy as Neve Campbell's wardrobe. It's so insubstantial, in fact, that it wouldn't hold your interest for 42 minutes of television, let alone 81 minutes in the cinema. I wouldn't want this film to be a minute longer, but surely there's a minimum length for a 'feature film', and it's longer than 81 minutes.
The plot amounts to this: A moneyed, aimless young woman agrees to sleep with a wealthy European for the fiscal benefit of her hustler boyfriend. My walk from the parking lot to the theatre had more plot. When a movie is short on plot, it either aspires to be a character study or a docudrama, such as Campbell's last (and far superior) movie, The Company. It's hard to know what writer/director Toback hoped When Will I Be Loved would be, but it's neither of these.
Read on for the rest of the review.
Code 46 is one of the most creative and edgy science-fiction movies I've seen in years. It's full of ideas and themes--so full, in fact, that they occasionally get in the way of our understanding of the plot and characters. Still, it's an admirable achievement on a small budget, replacing costly special effects with clever writing and compelling acting.
In a near future, where eastern China is a desert, William (Tim Robbins) arrives in Shanghai as a fraud investigator, seeking a counterfeiter working inside "The Sphinx", an omnipotent corporation. There, William meets and falls for Maria (Samantha Morton), a Sphinx employee who may be involved in the forging of 'papelles', travel and living permits which separate the haves from the have-nots. The have-nots live 'outside', scratching out an existence in vast deserts. William and Maria fall in love, and become struggle to free themselves from the corporation and Maria's past.
Samantha Morton, as always, is a revelation. She's the most tragic of actors, and seems so tremendously vulnerable in most of her roles. She is tiny beside Robbins's 6'5" frame, but that only contributes to our need to see him deliver her from her troubles. Robbins, as usual, is a steady everyman whose politics no doubt influenced his participation in this movie.
