You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Chickens, The Italian Job, Car

Random image and comic link -- Savage Chickens, the premier two-chickens-talking-on-a-post-it-note comic that I know of. Sometimes it doesn't quite work, but I found it more funny than not.

"Brevity is the soul of wit."
"Brevity: wit's soul."
"Oh shut up."

***

I watched three movies this weekend -- the original The Italian Job, the remake, and The Tuxedo.

I can see why The Italian Job became a cult classic. There's a lot of impressive stunt work, and it has a sense of fun -- bringing Noel Coward out of retirement to play the powerful and royalist criminal mastermind operating from inside prison works really well. I'm not a big fan of the Carry On-style humour, so having Benny Hill as a computer expert obsessed by large women didn't work for me; but I can see where they were shooting for. It's a messy movie, and some of the rewrites show through a little -- the computer guy is bundled off to the police station and is never seen again, for example -- and some of the attitudes have dated a little (such as the rampant nationalism). But there are enough cool bits to more than make up for the questionable or bad, and there are brief sprinkles of brilliance, like, "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" or "It's a very difficult job and the only way to get through it is we all work together as a team. And that means you do everything I say."

And I'd rank having a character called "Camp Freddie" in a bright pink suit and ruffles as a good bit, rather than an outdated one. ;) Oh, and the theme song at the end is dead catchy, as you'd expect from Quincy Jones.

The remake taught me several things:

(1) "Remake" can mean "shot for shot" (e.g. Psycho), or "take two non-thematic elements of the movie (e.g. a car-chase with minis and the McGuffin of gold bars) and do whatever." The first felt like lads having a lark, similar to the recent Ocean's Eleven remake; the second moved between serious heist/revenge movie and something slightly more goofy... not always completely successfully. (Some of the flashbacks, in particular, felt like a different movie.)

(2) Seth Green and Mos Def can be really funny. Not something that I ever really doubted, but still, nice to know.

(3) Never trust Edward Norton. Well -- yeah, of course. I have trust issues with Matt Damon (thanks to The Talented Mr Ripley), but I don't think I've ever seen Norton in anything where he didn't betray someone. No, wait -- I think I might have seen Death to Smoochy. But in general, Norton == sneaky Sam. (Apparently he appears here courtesy of contractual obligations, which may be why he's not as good as usual.)

There were lots of things that I thought worked really well -- exchanges like this one, for instance:

Left Ear: This dude got dogs. I don't do dogs... I had a real bad experience, man.
Charlie Croker: What happened?
Left Ear: I had. A bad. Experience. Damn it. I'M deaf.

Nice. :) But -- I'm not sure the things that the people who made the movie think are important are the same things I do. For example, it was obviously a big deal to them that they shut down Holywood Boulevard to do the stunts, and had the minis driving on the Walk of Fame, but it's all Big Generic American City to me -- I might be able to recogize San Fransico's hills, but that's it. Ironically, they have an exotic city chase -- the scenes in Venice at the beginning were much tenser in some ways. And they made a big deal about not having any CGI -- in an interview, the director was saying that people came up afterwards and asked whether certain things were CGI. He seemed to think it was a triumph to be able to say, "No, that was all real," and in some sense it was; in another sense, it just meant that was a place where you might have been able to save some money and time, as well as not risking the lives of people on the cast and crew for no good reason. If people think it's been faked while they're watching, it doesn't really matter whether it actually was or not.

(Having said that -- you'd want really, really good CGI, which might make the practical route the best way to go. But that's a financial consideration, rather than stylistic one.)

I don't want to sound too down on either of these movies -- they're both good fun, and worth watching. But they are flawed.

And speaking of flawed -- I went into The Tuxedo with low, low, low expectations. But it's actually not a bad little Jackie Chan movie. Let me rephrase -- I don't know that it's a good movie, but I actually enjoyed it. :) The science was so terrible that I actually felt my brain go, "Oh, right, this makes no sense," and turn off -- it might have bothered me ten years ago, but I'm more tolerant of "we're just using sciencey words for magic" now. And Jennifer Love-Hewitt's character had some fun moments, and comes across as a relatively strong character.

It's not his best movie -- in fact, it's probably in his bottom 10. But it looked like they had fun making it, and I'm glad I saw it, and I may well watch it again.

***

I got another call from the garage. I'm not getting the car back until next week, and all up it will have cost the better part of $2k to get it fixed. Even if I were thinking of selling it, it would be worth getting it done; but it's $2k that's not going into my mortgage, so I'll pause to grieve a little.

[pause]

And I'm done. :) Hey, it must be getting towards the end of my first fixed term. I've not managed to pay off as much as I'd hoped in my first year, but I've not done too badly; and I have high hopes for doing better next year. I suspect I'd do a lot better if I could pay directly into my revolving credit account, but you can't have everything... I'll have to talk to The One Who Knows when it comes time to shuffle things around.

Yes, yes, I'm the only one who cares about my mortgage. Look, it's important to me. :)

Posted by svend at October 6, 2005 2:31 PM