The movie Coyote Ugly is not about showing barely dressed barmaids dance around to music in front of drunk yobbos although you'd be forgiven for thinking that. It's actually about a young song writer trying to get discovered. She travels by herself to the big city in the hope of getting up on stage and showing the world how good her songs are... except she can't because she has stage fright. You can guess how it ends of course. Eventually she does get on stage, and everyone loves the song (helped along by an amazing backing band the quality of David Bowie's that magically learns her song in a day) and bang...
No... she doesn't become huge and popular. The last scene of the movie is popular singer LeAnn Rimes singing the main character's song. She didn't become famous, she merely sold the song to a record company and they palmed it onto their current popular female singer. As a musician it kind of made me sick, as the almost end of the movie sees everyone loving the main characters performance of the song, not just the song itself. Although somewhere in there the main character does say she wants to be a song writer, not a pop star. But it still left me hating the film for stupid reasons. I should have just hated it because it was crap.
And in The Ring, there is a point where our hero dives into the newspaper archives. She's ripping old newspapers down from carefully stacked shelves, sitting on piles of newspapers, thumbing through at high speed, ripping pages, and circling parts of the archive with pen. The historian/librarian in me hated her from then on... Destroying history in such a way.
I'm a freak.
Meanwhile, Russell Crowe's new film wins the award for the longest movie URL in the universe... I nearly choked on my popcorn when I saw it...
www.masterandcommanderthefarsideoftheworld.com
At least it doesn't have hyphen in it or have "the movie" tacked on the end.
I've just finished reading Stephen King's Dreamcatcher having just read his short story collection, Night Shift.
I found The Ring to be almost unbearable to watch. Having seen the "original" (most well known anyway) Japanese version I couldn't help spend the whole film comparing it. For the most part I blamed my familiarity with the story. Nothing in the new The Ring scared or interested me in the slightest. The new elements they added only annoyed and frustrated me. And as per all remakes of this time, they only served to point out many of the problems with the original, which makes me hate them even more. If I'd have seen this version, and then the Japanese version I can only think I'd have hated it too.
I thought 25th Hour was a ok film, but it felt very much like a book. And I don't like watching books. Ed Norton was ok. The WTC attack tie ins felt forced. Some parts of the film (Ed's character's sudden and random racism) were just crap. Maybe I didn't "get it". Maybe I don't care.
Revolutions was excellent. Compared to Zion, the final battle was rubbish. I spent some of the film arguing with myself over whether it was a cleverly written for making me think, or badly written for not being able to get it's point across clearly. I felt a little disappointed at the end that the films came down to such a simple idea, that it really was mostly a complicated and wordy way of telling a very simple story. But overall I loved it.
But not as much as Kill Bill... and how simple is that?
Dreamcatcher (the book) is also excellent. I'd place it up there with IT, and in some ways I place it almost as a sequel to IT. Not just because of their shared locations and constant references to that story, but also in theme, that of childhood friends who shared a gift when young, growing up and facing their horror together. It borrows strongly from many other alien stories, but I don't believe it even pretends to be clever, it's all to do with the journey. Much of the book is a chase... and I'm struggling to see just how interesting a film this could be, with much of the action happening in the characters heads, something I would have though would be impossible to film in any way except cloudythought vision, which would suck beyond belief. King's descriptions of the pain of his characters were particularly good, the book written with pen on paper while recovering from being hit by a car... The only thing that bothered me a little was the Christian elements (of the military) seemed very forced. As did a few comments on George Bush's almost-not presidency.
Night Shift was both good and terrible. I remember King's short stories being great but a great deal of them didn't interest me. There were however some golden moments, and it's refreshing to note the guy can write some interesting non-horror stories, but my final interest in King is his Sci-Fi/Horror element. His non-horror moments read to me like he's trying to hold back the beast.