Ut Humiliter Opinor

Movies.com has the Muppet balcony hecklers Statler and Waldorf doing a movie review feature akin to Siskel & Ebert. This week’s installment reviews Zorro and Jarhead. I’m still not sure what either movie is about, but they said Rumsfeld is still in the theater watching Jarhead because “he doesn’t have an exit strategy!”

Ouch! What good fun. Go check it out.

This is news I’ve been waiting for for a long time:

Shore’s Rings Complete Recordings Coming

The complete Oscar and Grammy winning score to “The Fellowship of the Ring,” from the epic film trilogy “The Lord of the Rings,” will be available in a deluxe four-disc edition from Reprise/WMG Soundtracks on November 22nd, 2005.

Eventually, the scores for all three movies will be released: 9 CDs in all. Howard Shore’s music brought the movies to life. The Two Towers in particular is the best, UHO. The Rohan themes are especially moving. Shore brings out the loneliness and hopelessness of a failing society, only to turn it into the glorious possibilities of a reborn king.

The one track I look forward to most, though, is from Return of the King. The current soundtrack eliminates the tragic splendor of the Ride of the Rohirrim to Minas Tirith. That is probably my favorite moment in all the films, and I was heartbroken that it was left out of the original release. I can’t say for certain why, but I remember that the Academy did not want to award Oscars for what it saw as repeat work, so it put a threshold in place to make sure submitted scores were not derivitaves. That set of music was a culmination of themes originally from The Two Towers so I still wonder if that’s why it was omitted. Whatever the reason, I’ll be glad to have it.

Fox News reports on the box office power of sex comedies. Personally, all this tells me is that - if true - I won’t be going to the movies any time soon.

Boys of Summer Put Libido in Box Office:

Pandya feels that we will see more from the sex comedy genre, and that it could help to resurrect the movie industry, which has been down more than 12 percent since 2004 and spent a good part of this spring and summer in its worst slump in 20 years.

That last three movies I saw are (in reverse order): The Fantastic Four, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and Star Wars. Not exactly high drama, but just good, escapist fun.

Hollywood keeps trying to figure out what the public wants to see. Try making good stories, and tell them well. Titanic wasn’t a great story, but it was a decent one told pretty well. The Spider-man movies are pretty typical hero movies, but very well done. Hollywood isn’t doing a very good job lately of finding good stories or good ways to tell them.

My wife took the kids to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory yesterday. All enjoyed it but came away with the same reaction: why remake it? Now, I expected that reaction from my wife, but when the kids shrug at a remake, you have to wonder what the point was.

(The point was that it got them in the seats, naturally, which I suppose they did.)

I have seen some of these for Lord of the Rings, but this is the first one I’ve seen for Star Wars. They are just too funny. For example, I didn’t realize Anakin was being cuckolded (you really just have to read it):

winterson.com: episode iii, the backstroke of the west

After reading the newspaper reviews, I wasn’t expecting a lot out of “Fantastic Four”. Critics slammed it right and left. It wasn’t “dark enough” (Batman) or personal enough (Spider-Man). After seeing it today with my pre-teen, though, I have to say the critics were wrong - and boy is Hollywood glad:

‘Fantastic’ debut snaps box-office downturn

“It took four superheroes to end this slump, and Hollywood is grateful,” Dergarabedian said. “Comic-book movies, if properly marketed, are exactly what mainstream audiences want to see in their summer movies. This just proves again that if you bring out the right kind of movie, people will line at the theater.”

Make no mistake, FF is not high drama - it’s a popcorn flick plain and simple. If you don’t know the basics, here they are: four friends get exposed to cosmic rays in space, giving them super-powers. The four are not all of one mind, though, and their dysfunctional-family relationship is as much a part of the story as their powers and their fight against von Doom (the bad guy who’s also with them in the accident).

Reed (Ioan Gruffud) is a geek, plain and simple. He gets more worked up over spacesuits made with unstable molecules instead of the fact that his ex-girlfriend Sue is already wearing it skin-tight looking hot! He’s the play-it-safe type who has to learn that sometimes you have to take risks. Computer programmers everywhere are secretly rooting for him, don’t let them tell you any different.

Johnny (Chris Evans) and Ben (Michael Chiklis) are the comic relief. Johnny is the hot-rod, thrill-seeker who likes his transformation to the Human Torch, and he constantly harasses the dour Ben, who has to deal with his permanent transformation to the rocky Thing. When Ben crunches Johnny’s car into a metal ball, you can’t help but laugh.

Sue (Jessica Alba) is the weak point of the group as a character. She is there to point out Reed and Johnny’s flaws, show off a little flesh, and talk tough to her ex-boss von Doom.

Victor von Doom (Julian McMahon) is the film’s weak spot. A hero flick is generally made on the strength of its villain, and von Doom comes across as pretty mediocre. Compared to Magneto in the X-Men - where they very effectively told his back story and rationale - Doom is a cardboard cut-out villain: greedy, corporate bad guy who - on the verge of losing his company - decides to take out his personal frustrations on the heroes. Pretty weak, but not very essential to the movie, fortunately.

So, the film itself goes over well. As far as the critics and Hollywood go, I keep hoping that they will realize that well-made, family-friendly movies with a good story can do very well for them. Even though it was PG-13, I had read enough to know that most pre-teens will have little problem with it. After seeing it, I’m almost surprised it was PG-13. It’s a pretty family-friendly movie overall - and that’s always a plus when titillation and toilet-humor seem to rule the box office as much as anything else.