This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
|
 It was a couple of weekends ago now, but it was time for a DVD we own but had never watched. The choice this time was In the Shadow of the Moon a DVD Brandy had given me for Christmas. It is a documentary on the various space flights to the moon, now almost 40 years ago. No narrator, just clips from interviews with the astronauts. I’d known most of the “factoids” mentioned, but this was still very well done and offered a look at things from a bit different direction than I’d seen before, with the emphasis on the first person recollection of the events.
The most lasting impression for me though wasn’t that, it was some of the film based (rather than video based) footage of some of the later moon landings. THe bit that gets replayed over and over and is ingrained in everybody’s consciousness is the fuzzy footage of the first landing. That’s what always had come to my mind anyway. But some of the footage from the later missions… crystal clear clarity. Looked like it could have been a brand new high def TV show. OK, not quite, I know it was DVD quality, but still, a lot better than any of my previous memories of watching footage of stuff from this era.
And it was beautiful. The space ships. The people in suits… and the landscape of the moon. Not just a little bit of land right under the lander, but mountains and valleys and hills, with the moon buggy driving around and kicking up dust. It was striking.
For those not into documentary type stuff, you probably won’t like this. But if you like historical or scientific documentaries, this is a good one to add to your queue.![]()
 Last weekend was time for another Doctor Who DVD. Specifically, this time it was The Time Meddler, a First Doctor episode from 1965. We had actually been up to the Third Doctor, but in the mean time they released more earlier episodes, so we are back to the First Doctor again.
In general, I’ve felt like watching the First Doctor was basically an exercise in historical curiosity. They were interesting, but not compelling or really all that much fun to watch.
This episode surprised me. It actually kept me interested and engaged for the whole four episodes. (It helped that it was only four.) The Doctor was actually somewhat sympathetic. I didn’t mind the companions much. And I liked the whole premise behind the Monk. (He was another Time Lord, actively trying to change history to make things better, which of course violates various rules against interfering with history.) We got to see another TARDIS, which is always nice. It was fun.
I actually ENJOYED a First Doctor episode. (OK, some of the others were OK, but I definitely enjoyed this one more than any of the others I’ve seen so far.) This may be because this is the LATEST of all the first Doctor episodes I’ve ever watched. From things I’ve read, the First Doctor really grew into the character and became much more of a sympathetic character and in general the series matured a bit as things progressed. This was the very end of the Second Season. So maybe by then things had gotten into a groove and had become something that more closely resembles the later seasons that I am more used to. Dunno.
Anyway, I liked it. So if anybody out there is thinking of sampling a First Doctor story, I’d say this one is a pretty good place to start.
![]()
 So last week was time for another Amy movie. This time it was Bruce Almighty. And this time Amy actually watched it with me! Brandy skipped though.
I’m generally not a big fan of Jim Carrey or his sort of physical comedy. And this was not an exception to that. It had a few moments, but for the most part I got tired very quickly of Carrey’s exaggerated motions and funny faces and the like. And while the premise sounded interesting, I think it worked less well as executed and got a bit preachy at the end.
After it was over we watched some of the deleted scenes. Some of them I think would have made it slightly better, but even more of them were of the “I am so glad they left that out” variety.
Amy laughed a lot and enjoyed it though.
Anyway, overall this was a “bleh” for me. I enjoyed spending the time with Amy watching it, and I did laugh a few times, but it certainly wasn’t very memorable. Unless you’re a Jim Carrey fan, I’d probably skip it.
![]()
 So, the last DVD scheduled was a Brandy movie, and it was Pulp Fiction from 1994. I’d seen it before. More than once I think. But not since a year or two after it came out. Brandy had never seen it. We started watching it over a month ago I think. We went maybe 40 minutes, then Brandy had had enough. We waited until the next week, then we kept going. Maybe another 30 minutes. Then that was enough. Then the third week, it just didn’t happen. Then the fourth. Brandy really really hated the movie. Did not want to sit down and watch the rest.
So last weekend I sat down, started over, and watched the whole thing straight through.
I actually kind of like Pulp Fiction. It isn’t super great, and I think it got a bit more hype than it deserved, but it was a funny movie. It was supposed to be a comedy, right? That’s really the only way it works for me, as a comedy. A bunch of it is just funny. Mostly one liner stuff, or some of the physical stuff.
They do of course do that mixed up timeline thing I generally hate. But it is screwed up enough it is actually fun to figure out what order things really happened, so that spins a few brain cycles. And then of course there is the whole “what is in the box” thing and similar bits of trying to interpret the “meaning” and symbolism in the movie. Blah. Whatever.
Some of the violence is a bit over the top, but that is part of what makes it funny.
Oh, and I love the soundtrack. Some great music in there.
Anyway, I liked it. Brandy couldn’t even finish it. Amy didn’t even try.
The end.
![]()
 It was time for yet another Doctor Who DVD. In this case, it was time for Disk Two of a story we started in September. This was the Third Doctor story Doctor Who and the Silurians which is interesting because it is the only Doctor Who story that had “Doctor Who and the…” in the title shown on screen. It was an accident. Somebody screwed up when producing the titles. Oops.
The last few sentences were quoted exactly from my review of the previous disk. I’m getting lazy.
In this second half we find out a bit more about where the aliens come from, and there are some battles. The Doctor is trying to make peace between the humans and the Silurians, but most of the humans, and most of the Silurians, want no such thing. The Doctor tricks the Silurians into something he hopes will avoid conflict but keep them alive. Of course, the humans decide immediately thereafter to blow them all up.
Oh well. And that was the end.
As usual with these older Doctor Who episodes, the pacing is VEERRRYYY SLLLLOOOOWWWW. And of course the effects are awful. They have some level of charm though.
We need to go faster though. I like the Fourth Doctor and beyond much better than the first three.
[05:15 UTC edited for a typo and minor wording change]
 Last weekend was time for another DVD. This time it was from my Netflix list. I’m not sure how or when it originally got on my list, since it is many years from bottom to top of my netflix list, but the next film was American Beauty. Despite it being an Oscar Winner and such, the only thing I really knew about it was the Lolita-esque part of it and the image of the girl with the rose petals. Amy expressed no interest. Brandy was busy watching movies she had to watch for class. So I was once again watching by myself.
I wasn’t expecting much. Dunno why. The first 30 minutes or so did drag a bit. It was slow, and not super compelling. But then again, it was supposed to be laying the groundwork about how much the main character’s life sucked. Then it got a bit creepy when he started lusting after the cheerleader.
But then it hit its groove. It seemingly cycled between hilariously funny, creepy, and just sad. In the end end it was a compelling combination. I liked it a lot. I guess I understand the five Oscars. :-)
And, despite the impression I had before hand, it was most definitely NOT primarily about the guy and him lusting after the teenager. This was a portion of it to be sure, and an important element, but it was just one element in a larger picture. It was more a mid-life-crisis movie than creepy old man in love with teenager movie, although of course that is one of the ways the mid-life-crisis manifested itself.
Anyway. Good movie. I liked it. Worth a rental if you didn’t see it back in 1999 when it was in the theaters.
 This week was time for an Amy pick. She had picked American Virgin. This was a Year 2000 teen sex comedy sort of film. Of course, when I announced that this week’s movie night would be a Amy movie night, and since this was her current Netflix movie this would be what we would be watching (and I subsequently intercepted it at the mailbox to be sure I had it first so we could watch it) Amy announced that this was NOT a movie she wanted to watch with her parents. Brandy also took one look at the Netflix description of the movie:
When your father is a pornographer, what can you do to shock him? If you’re Katrina Bartalotti (Mena Suvari), you announce you’re going to lose your virginity — live on the Internet! Bob Hoskins co-stars as the mastermind behind the plan to broadcast Katrina’s deflowering. This wicked satire of the information age proves there are more than a few kinks left in the Net.
At that point Brandy said she was also pretty sure she didn’t want Amy watching this movie at all anyway. Yeah, I can understand that. Although I generally have the philosophy that if you are old enough that you WANT to see something, then you are old enough to actually see it… with appropriate context provided by parents as needed. But Brandy also said SHE didn’t want to watch it.
But since was the movie of the week, I was going to watch it at 05:00 UTC on Saturday no matter what happened damn it! I want to do a movie every week, and this was this week’s movie! And besides, it had Bob Hoskins in it. He was a real actor, it couldn’t be too bad could it? After all, he did Roger Rabbit and that was a good movie, right?
Wrong.
With the single lone exception of Jackass: The Movie which literally almost made me vomit in the theater it was so bad, this was pretty much the worst movie I have ever seen in my life.
OK, first of all, if you are supposed to be a teen sex comedy, there should actually be some sex, or at least some nudity. In the whole movie there was perhaps a grand total of 4 seconds of partial nudity of secondary characters. And while there was implied sex at one point, and implied simulated sex at maybe a couple of other points, there wasn’t even an actual real sex scene. Not even one. Not even a bad one, let alone a decent one.
What the movie actually had was 88 minutes of absolutely horrible acting, incredibly lame sex jokes that weren’t remotely funny, random people chasing and acting mad at each other, an unfunny and also undramatic scene of Bob Hoskins being tied up and essentially tortured, and of course an absolutely predictable ending.
After 30 minutes I had to pause the DVD and leave for a bit because it was just so bad. After seeing the look on my face when I came up during this break, the look of abject horror and disgust, Amy decided that maybe she didn’t want to see the movie at all after all. She asked me to PLEASE put it right back in the mail to Netflix when I was done.
Then I took a deep breath or two and headed back downstairs to finish the movie. It took a lot of will power to do so. It was just so bad. And the last 58 minutes of the movie were no better than the first 30. If anything, they were worse.
Having seen the whole movie, I don’t think it would have been particularly bad if Amy had watched it. I mean, it of course has sex jokes and sex references. But she is a teenager about to enter high school. It isn’t like she hasn’t seen or heard more explicit things elsewhere, including in movies we have watched together as a family, let alone the things that teenagers discuss amongst themselves. It is 2008 after all, not 1988 or 1968. (Not like those years were really all THAT much different other than ease of access to things due to the internet.) And there was nothing particularly wrong or offensive about it… other than the fact that watching something so horribly stupid has to leave a mark of some sort, perhaps permanently stripping away a couple of IQ points from anybody who watches it.
It was just awful.
Please, if you are ever tempted to rent this movie… don’t.
And if your teenager wants to watch it… I personally wouldn’t tell them no. I would however continuously make fun of them because of how insanely stupid a movie they were wanting to watch, and tell them if they really want to watch something in the teenage-sex-comedy-romp genre (which are mostly horrible, based on the few I have ever seen all or parts of) there MUST be better ones to choose from. There really must be. Right?
Oh, and I’d insist on sitting there watching it with them (even though it is so bad it would be somewhat painful) just to better make fun of them for wanting to see something so horrible.
Anyway. Don’t rent this movie. Really.
 Time for another movie. This time it was my turn. And specifically, it was time for another from the AFI 100 Years… 100 Movies list. Having started at #100 almost a decade ago, I’m now at #53, Amadeus. It was long… on a double sided DVD that you actually had to flip over… so we split it over two nights of viewing.
Anyway, I think I had seen parts of it on TV over the years, but am not sure that I ever saw the whole thing straight through. If I had, I did not remember.
The movie of course won all kinds of awards after it came out in 1984. Sometimes that sort of thing holds up, sometimes it does not. In any case, I liked the movie. I’m always a sucker for period pieces and character stuff, and this was pretty much 100% that sort of thing. No chases and such, just period costumes, psychological drama, and lots of Mozart music as you track Mozart’s life and interaction with Salieri. It is the kind of thing that after you are done compels you to go read a whole bunch of Wikipedia pages to learn more about the actual people and events as compared to the fictionalized version. Well, OK, at least it compelled me to do so. I probably spent a couple hours starting at the Mozart and Salieri pages and branching out from there to a variety of related people and topics.
Amy did not watch this movie with me, but Brandy did. She had watched it when it first came out, but not since. She said she had remembered she liked it, but was less impressed this time around. And particularly, she was annoyed by the character of Mozart’s wife. Personally, I liked the wife. OK, she was a bit whiny at times, and did not seem particularly bright. But she was cute. :-)
Anyway, for those who haven’t seen it in awhile, and who like this kind of movie, it is worth the rental.
 A little while ago we finally watched another DVD. This time it was Brandy’s turn. Her movie this time around was The Gift. There have been several films by that title, so to be specific, this is the one from 2000 starring Cate Blanchett.
I had never heard of this movie. Almost immediately after it started though, I was reminded of the TV show Medium. It seemed to have a very similar vibe most of the time, although perhaps a bit darker than the TV show tends to be.
We have a psychic who sees visions about a crime and helps the local police try to solve the crime, and in the process gets all tangled up with all of the people involved. There is suspense as we try to figure out who the killer is, and as the psychic is menaced by the various suspects. Oh, and Katie Holmes gets to be topless and giggle around a bit while being killed. Fun.
Anyway, I think I liked it. It was suspenseful. It had a little mystery. (Although I guessed the killer pretty early on.) It had a few twists. It was worth the two hours and worth adding to your Netflix queue if you like this sort of movie.
And it makes me wonder when new episodes of Medium start again. :-)
It was time for another Doctor Who DVD. We started a few weeks ago, but split the four episodes on this DVD up over a couple of weeks. This was the Third Doctor story Doctor Who and the Silurians which is interesting because it is the only Doctor Who story that had “Doctor Who and the…” in the title shown on screen. It was an accident. Somebody screwed up when producing the titles. Oops.
Anyway, it was in color! Woo! That is a welcome change after the older ones we’d watched lately. This one was first broadcast in 1970. Still before I was born, but getting closer. :-)
This one is about dinosaurs and humanoid reptiles in a cave below a nuclear power research station. What else can you say about that?
Well, actually there is a bit more to it. But this DVD is actually only the first half of the story. There is a second half, which we will eventually get to. And knowing a few spoilers, I gather we’ll find out more about the origins of these humanoid reptiles in the second half.
So far it is OK. Like all of these older episodes, the pacing is much slower than modern shows. It still has a bit of charm though. I do like the Fourth Doctor and beyond the best though. I’ve never really been able to get all that into one through three.
For now though, this was OK. And we’ll get the the second half sooner or later.
|
|