Bond movies usually stand alone pretty well, but this one was much more of a sequel than the previous incarnations of the series. He’s still talking about his love interest from the last film in this one, trying to get revenge for her death…I think. She must have died, because she wasn’t in this movie. I sort of fell asleep the last time I watched Casino Royale. I liked it any everything, but extended gambling scenes in movies bore me.

The movie starts off like a Bourne movie, with brutal fights, a few chases in European locales, and lots of shakey-cam fighting. I like Daniel Craig’s Bond fighting style. It’s rough, tough, inspired, and somewhat bullheaded. The jumping around on rooftops was back, but it wasn’t nearly as ridiculous as the construction site parkour stuff in Casino Royale.

This Bond movie is trying to break from tradition, using an overarching story that spans multiple movies to expand the franchise. However, when you don’t see the resolution of the whole story, running through the tropes of a Bond film just feels like an exercise. Each story still contains has a bad guy that he stops along the way, has an evil lair that explodes, and has multiple women for him to hook up with along the way. The overarching plot line of the movie was much more interesting than the details of this particular movie’s villain however.

I liked this movie’s action, and I liked him trying to uncover the villain’s plot. The fights had style. The villain himself, the goal of his organization, and the ridiculous conspiracy involved in covering it up was underwhelming. You expected something a little bigger than what they delivered. The final third of the movie was more centered on a secondary character’s drive for revenge than Bond himself. There were parallels, but it didn’t work that well for me.

While it’s okay for a movie to develop other characters, the ONLY resonance the ending had was for a Bond girl to get revenge, then immediately to go back to a whimpering side kick in the VERY NEXT SCENE. The final scene taking place at some remote villain’s lair and the entire ending fell flat for me. It just didn’t make a lot of sense, and didn’t seem as grounded as the rest of the movie did. If anything, the ending of this movie was TOO Bond cliche, and not all that satisfying for the middle of a trilogy.

I’d recommend seeing this movie, but it’s not really a complete stand-alone film in any sense. It doesn’t push any boundary set by Casino Royale, and doesn’t complete the story it started without a sequel. It’s still better than anything Pierce Brosnan did as Bond post-Goldeneye. If you watched this movie back-to-back-to-back with it’s eventual sequel on some cable night marathon, it would stand up much better. It’s not nearly as good as it could have been.

When I say, “Reminded me of an old boss,” I don’t mean that the lack of makeup and the sweat pants reminded me how she looked on most days she came to work. Aileen, the killer character really ACTED like my old boss. This woman used to be a manager I had in college. She was one of those managers that was so “outside the box” that you expected something shady was going on the entire time, but couldn’t place your finger on her. It turns out, it was grand theft for my manager, and not murder, but still, seeing this portrayal of a woman driven to the edge was familiar for me.

My old boss had the same swagger and belicose way of talking. She had the same hard smoking habit, and spoke with the same incredibly blatant bit lying that characterized by my old boss’ style. If Charlize Theron wasn’t about half her weight, she would have been a dead ringer appearance for her too.

My wife and I both liked the movie, but were disturbed by it. It’s not an easy movie to watch. My wife hated Christina Ricci’s character more than the Charlize Theron character. That’s an accomplishment. I was more freaked that a person I had nearly forgotten about was brought to life on screen. The things people hide in their lives as they try to scrape by shown in this movie were a reminder that the world isn’t always as nice as we think it was.

I have started watching “The Shield“, and I’m hooked. I blame this on Jeff Cannata from Totally Rad Show. I started watching The Shield after Battlestar Galactica went off the air on Fox Korea. I had made it a habit to stay up and watch BSG, and when this show called “The Shield” took it’s place, I gave it a chance because it came very highly recommended by Jeff. He and I have very similar tastes, so I was willing to watch a few episodes. It’s not like there was anything else on television, ever.

I watched most of what I found out to be the third season. For an arcing story, it didn’t seem too hard to follow the characters. Cop dramas make it easy to jump in most of the time for the sake of new watchers. Their are still “busts” from week to week, but fifteen minutes or so of each show is based around the arc for the season.

Now with MegaTV, I’ve started to catch up to what’s been broadcast so far in Korea. I’ve got the first season finished, and I’m working through the second. The back story stuff has filled in a lot of the questions I had, but it’s made me like the show even more. I still hate the same characters, and root for others like I did before, but no one is a saint on this show.

The Shield is a show that should be very predictable, but shocks and surprises me every single episode. Just when you think a character hits rock bottom, they go farther. Just when you think you’ve witnessed the worst, you get shocked by a new crime. Just when you think someone crosses the line, you worry, then see if they can make it right again. The show plays on my expectations of a cop show and does so much better than the standard procedural drama. I understand Jeff’s passion in trying to promote the show to people now that I’ve seen it. It’s a show worth spreading the word about.

Jeff Cananta’s recommend a few other things I like, like Super Mario Galaxy (he defended it while the other two hosts trashed it), some comic books (Preacher), and a few movies that I ended up enjoying. It’s incredibly cool to watch TotallyRadShow, as it feels like I have a kindred spirit working to sort out the good stuff for me and save my time. Now that I found out that they have a Cowon D2 friendly video podcast (!), I can even watch their show easily when I don’t have time to watch the feed in Miro. So awesome.

However, this is around the time when there is a flurry of Oscar nominated movies all competing in theaters at the same time. I don’t follow the Oscars, and I don’t care who wins, but a diverse set of movies coming to Korea that are decent? It’s about damn time. This will continue for a few weeks, then we’ll go back to the same old crap.

Anyway, we saw Juno. There were only about ten people in the theater. There was a group of Korean woman that spoke fluent English, us, and a few couples. The group of other English speakers was laughing a lot more than anyone else. I was laughing hard enough a few times that I got shushed by my wife. This killed me:

Juno MacGuff: Your little girlfriend gave me the stinkeye in art class yesterday.
Paulie Bleeker: Katrina’s not my girlfriend alright? And I doubt she gave you the stinkeye that’s just how her face looks, you know? That’s just her face.
(Cuts to a girl that has a perfect “stinkeye” look on her face staring at them in the distance.)

I don’t think that the translators did a very good job of bringing out the flowing slang of teenage life. Juno without the dialog is missing a lot. Both my wife and I enjoyed the film regardless of any barriers of language though.

For example, this article is basically “The Mystery Method” in Japan. Working on the theory that even a creepy dude like David Copperfield can get a girlfriend, other people use magic to trick women. BUT IT’S IN JAPAN. That’s worth an article? Must be a slow news day at Wired.

So, why am I blogging about it? Because of this quote:

“Since joining Mr. Fujita’s school, I have had five successful relationships,” says Hachioji Robocop, a 27-year-old civil servant who has been taking the course since 2004. “I lost my virginity six months into the course, and now I can now communicate with women. I’m very grateful.”

This guy’s name is Hachioji Robocop. ROBOCOP. A man with the last name Robocop should NOT have problems meeting women in Japan. They LOVE robots in Japan! Unless all the anime I’ve seen is leading me in the wrong direction, and all that “The Japanese are so weird” reporting is messing with my head, I imagine things heading in a terrible direction for this man because of his name when he approaches women.

Seeing as this is Japan, you’d expect H. ROBOCOP to simply stop a random woman on the street and say:

“PANTIES. DROP THEM. YOU HAVE 3 SECONDS TO COMPLY.”

Or, when things go badly on a first date:

“DEAD OR ALIVE, YOU ARE COMING WITH ME TO MY SMALL APARTMENT FULL OF LAME ANIME FIGURES.”

After whatever awkward pawing has left H. Robocop unsatisfied, he’ll realize what he’s done.

“MADAME, YOU HAVE SUFFERED AND EMOTIONAL SHOCK. I WILL NOTIFY A RAPE CRISIS CENTER.”

Primer

Which is available, in it’s entirety, at Google Video. (77 minutes)
Intensive Film Warning: This is a movie where you have to pay close attention to EVERYTHING that happens, watch carefully, and you STILL won’t understand it the first time around. You aren’t even supposed to. Anyone that claims to understand this movie the first time around is a savant, or a liar.

This film does not go out of it’s way to explain anything that is happening, and throws science jargon around a bit. It’s a cruel mistress, but rewarding in the end. It’s really amazing that this film was created at all, and despite the SHOESTRING budget, looks SO good. The budget never seems to impact the film at all.

The Basic Plot

Primer is a story about four engineers that work out of their garage trying to get rich inventing something and filing patents. Two of the engineers discover a weird effect as a byproduct of their latest experiment, and decide to cut the other two out of the group as they decide the best way to cash in on this new invention. As they begin to explore what they can do as a result of their invention their partnership is strained when they have different visions of the best use of the technology. Things happen, causality is played with, and your brain will start to hurt.

I saw it. Now what?
Here is a timeline explaining WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED after you watch it the first time.

I’d like to spread the love for this film, and also talk about it. If anyone else has some mind blowing movies to watch, please share in this thread.

The mechanic of Time Travel in Primer
A general description of the plot.
Wikipedia
Interview with the maker of the film.
An entire FORUM dedicated to trying to figure out this movie.

Cross posted with the Geek in Korea forum.

Rifftrax, headed up by Mike Nelson, did me a great service by making fun of Batman & Robin. I remember hearing  news about that movie when I was in high school. Being a former comic book reading fan, I felt it was my duty to find out all sorts of information about movies based on characters I liked.

I had a faint hope that somehow that movie would be good. I even saw it in the theater. The only repressed memory that remains of the experience is when the film ended, with the three “Bat” characters ran in front of a spot light and then the music faded out to some terrible Smashing Pumpkins song I thought was cool at the time.

What sets this Rifftrax apart is that the script came from fans, not the actors themselves. Usually the Rifftrax crew is responsible for watching the movies dozens of times and coming up with jokes to ease the pain. Instead, the Rifftrax forums put it upon themselves to write the script and then edit it for the performers. Sadly, I didn’t know about this, because I would have been willing to watch that film multiple times just for the chance that one of my jokes would be spoken by Mike Nelson himself.

Anyway, the fact that this is a fan production is evident as the movie goes on. While the jokes were funny, and sometimes hilariously funny, there are more gaps in Batman & Robin than any other rifftrax I’ve watched. Even Mike, riffing entirely alone, would talk more during Roadhouse than in the last 30 minutes of Batman & Robin. There are minutes without dialog from the performers. I’d rather have silence than a lame joke, and it’s clear that most people didn’t make it through the entire movie when they had donated their scripts. There were a lot of missed opportunities in the last few ridiculous minutes of the movie that desperately needed to be heckled.

I’m not sure if the writing process will always produce a “front loaded” script, or that people just give up when they realize they have to watch a crappy movie over and over to write something funny. However, if given the opportunity to ever participate in any future events of this kind, my strategy for writing a joke to get into a script would be to start with the last thirty minutes of a movie and heckle everything I saw. Something would stick, and then I’d be immortalized in Internet geekdom by being able to say I heckled with the best.

This time it wasn’t about a phone. It was about a product tied into our Internet service. We have “Megapass” Internet. There has been a product roll out of “MegaTV” in Daejeon, and we got an offer for three months of free service. What’s “MegaTV“? IPTV. What the hell is that? Imagine on-demand movies in a set top box delivered via the Internet. It’s like AppleTV, except without the stupid.

When I came home from work, there was a wire from my Internet connection socket over to our television. The MegaTV box sits like a cable box, and when you fire it up it’ll show a menu. It’s not programmed with live television channels like cable, but instead has a large list of titles available for instant viewing. Choose a title, and it’ll play. The stuff is compressed. The newer the material is, the better the compression seems to be. The grainy action stuff reminds me of something slightly better than DiVX 3.0 era compression, not that great, but watchable.

There are newer titles available for a small fee, like a pay for view movie, except it’s ALWAYS available to watch. You don’t have to wait for a title to start, you just press a button and it begins. It also will remember where you stopped watching something and bookmark it for the next viewing.

While the number of foreign movies is as larger than any corner store, they have several television series too. I started watching “The Shield” a few months back, and now I can watch the series from the beginning. This alone will make it worth the low subscription fee if we keep it past the free trial offer. The Shield ran on the same channel that carried “Battlestar Galactica”. If THAT ever came available, I could watch the entire series with my wife with subtitles. That would kick tremendous ass.

Right now, both my wife and I are weary about greater access to on demand movie and television access. She said she had intended to run some errands, sat down to see if there was something she wanted to watch, and only realized the time she had wasted when I came home from work.

I got up and watched a movie this morning. Deathproof was free, and it was so bad it left me with a headache that lasted for five hours.  I had to take a nap because it hurt my brain so much. At least it was well compressed and looked better than some of the older movies I had checked out. Planet Terror is 100x better in every regard.

Then, I went and upped the ante by purchasing a Rifftrax for “Batman and Robin”. (HOLY CRAP. WHAT AM I DOING?! VOLUNTEERING TO WATCH THAT? WHY!) The MegaTV service has nearly half of the Rifftrax catalog on demand. If working out the sync issues is easy enough when watching it on the TV, this could be a regular thing for me.

The console gaming room was in Rodeo Town department store not far from where I work. Since this is my most frequented shopping place, I had actually seen the place we were headed to weeks before and had checked it out. I had passed it up because there wasn’t any kind of game I’d have been willing to play on a lunchbreak.

Our group of four had four hours to kill before the film. We got hooked up with four different screens, four different Xbox 360’s, and some copies of Call of Duty 4. I’ve never played a game on the Xbox before, I don’t play modern shooters, and I don’t really like team based death match stuff, but this game was a blast.

There are different soldiers with different attributes, weapons, and abilities, and they all change the game in subtle ways. I was a touch overwhelmed with the controls for the first hour or so, but once I adjusted to the playstyle and weapons I felt like I was having a good time. I don’t have the patience for sniping though.

The Cloverfield movie was really interesting and different. I went in completely unspoiled. I didn’t know more than what was on the poster.

The monster and the “meta-story” that was going on in the background was interesting, and I’d be willing to follow another set of survivors through whatever was happening to find out more of what was going on. The problem is that the way the story was set up, no one else DID know what was going on.

The shaky camera wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be, but occasionally it stretched my belief to think someone would hold on and continue filming despite the obvious danger. There were several parts that left me scratching my head, as people walking around unarmed, expecting to be attacked when things are readily available to defend themselves with is an annoying oversight.

My feeling of the movie is that it belongs to the “Youtube” generation, and is something you experience as much as you watch. It’s fundamentally different to everything I’ve seen for a long time, the same way that “Survivor” was fundamentally different than everything else on television 7 or 8 years ago. I’m sure it’s going to inspire a lot of other movies in similar styles, which I’m not sure is going to be good for movies ultimately. There are only so many “Blair Witch Projects” I’m willing to watch. The Koreans in the theater let out a groan when the movie ended, and a lot of people complained of headaches because of the subtitles. I don’t think I could have watched this with subtitles.

I liked it a lot more than I expected I would. If I had been spoiled to the plot, or had been following the viral video stuff, I’d probably have felt disappointed. Since I didn’t have any expectations whatsoever, I was pleasantly surprised.

HOLY CRAP. That movie has an ending worth watching. Do yourself a favor and watch this movie if you haven’t been spoiled for the ending yet. WOW. I haven’t been to a nail biter like this in the theaters since “The Others“.