Saturday, May 31, 2003

A little bit of movie geekery - Just saw The Italian Job - buckets of fun. THAT is what Oceans 11 half-tried to be, a quality ensemble heist flick. In fact, Oceans wasn't bad as that - it was just not very good as a caper flick, the heist flick's more difficult cousin. Some real fun car chase work, too, in Mini Coopers - Salon's review is basically just about the cars, in fact. And there's a cameo by Shawn Fanning, of Napster fame. Very much worth a matinee. TiVo is a wonderful thing. Duh. Specifically, TiVo is a wonderful thing because I have, sitting waiting for me to watch, Raise The Red Lantern, Eat Drink Man Woman, and American History X. Adding to this over the next week or so will be Quills, Woman of the Year, Truffaut's Farenheit 451, Cabaret, Platoon, The Searchers... I think you get the point. All that off three channels - IFC, TCM, and AMC. I've got HBO too, but I don't actually watch MOVIES from there - that's mainly for The Wire, which starts its new season tomorrow night, by the way. I read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls recently, and it's amazing how much easier it is for me to get access to important movies now than it was when people like Bogdanovich were getting started in the '60s. Technology is a wonderful thing. Got a DVD in the mail today - a most-likely-bootleg-but-I-don't-care-'cos-it's-region-free copy of Hero. That's Zhang Yimou, director of (among others) Raise The Red Lantern, responding to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - Jet Li, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, and Donnie Yen starring in a historical epic of China's unification, or something like that. Honestly, I don't care WHAT the plot is. That's a brilliant director, great-great-great kung-fu stars, and f'n Christopher Doyle doing cinematography - he did, among many, many others, my current favorite for the title of Most Gorgeously Shot Movie Ever, The Quiet American. I mean, this is *perfect*. Got nominated for a foreign-language Oscar, too. But Miramax keeps pushing the US release date, demanding further changes, etc... Screw that. This is too good to wait for a little thing like legality - I picked up a copy for 15 bucks (including shipping!) on eBay. It's got English subtitles, though I'm still guessing at the menus - I did find a translation of the opening and closing text, which is nice. I'm not going to watch 'til tonight - I'm going to go full geek and seal the room from outside light and sound. I like to be a dork sometimes. =)

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